I don't, I placed my light and batteries in the SOB enhanced medic bag. It's difficult to standardise.

Almost.
I'm almost to AA only, I'm already at 100% LED lamps, most of my other stuff runs on AA, but I have a few stragglers (a radio and a set of FRS radios) that use AAA and I don't want to replace them just yet.
But with the Lithium cells, I've found that AA's do all that I need. I'm not planning on buying more "D" cells any time soon.

Like Polak187, I try to keep my batteries to CR123s and AAs. I find that things like GPS, Radios, back-up cell phone chargers, maglights, ect usually can be found in AA and high powered flashlights in CR123's. I bet if need be you might even be able to start a vehicle off of those CR123's. <img src="images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

Reference NiMh shelf life. I have found quite a bit of variability in shelf life between brands.

Years ago I called eveready and they said 3%/day discharge. But I know there was a product change and it got much better. Still, not as good as disposable alkaline.

Best so far for me is eveready NH-15 which is a 1850 mah AA battery. Radio shack seems to be far worse. I keep some eveready NH-15's in two FRS radios in the truck and they seem to last a long time (weeks) and are still functional.

Check the eveready site www.energizer.com for spec. sheets. No shelf life given though.

RS batteries fail quickly and I have a big pile of them that have begun to leak. Guess I should run a shelf life test on the NH-15's. If I do, someday, I will post results.

Thanks for the info. I'll pick up a set of the energizer and try them out. The ones I have are Sanyo 1650mAH I bought a couple years ago. They worked well at first, ran my digicam through two 16m cf cards on the same set of batteries. Now I have to swap around just to get the camera to turn on. I didn't treat them as well as I should, the digicam forums all say to keep them together in sets and such, I would just grab the first three that were charged. I got to where I stopped using them in anything else because I feared that they would be dead when I tried to use them.

I have one of the Nitrolon Z-2 that is now EDC, bought a new forearm for my shotgun that has a built in Surefire and I found a good discount on a 6-P. Surefire has a good site and will send a really nice, informative catalog. I just weighed the cost , features and my expected use before I decided. The Nitrolon Z-2 worked well at an MVA the other night.

What about chargers that have an automatic drain-down system before starting to recharge.

Might this help remove the requirement of using consistent pairs of batteries when grabbing recharged ones? If all the batteries you recharge are all drained down to nothing first before recharging, why would it matter if they were not originally paired?

Bountyhunter

Full drains are not real helpful though. Newer battery technologies prefer to be topped opp rather than fully discharged. In the early NiCad days you wanted a charger that could drain before charging but not any more. NiMH and Lion have a limited number for full discharges.

Fwiw, the AccuManager 2020 charges AAA -> D cells, plus 9V, and understands NiCad, Nimh and rechargable alkaline. It's about fifty bucks, works nicely off 12V or mains and has some very funky battery reconditioning tech: I don't know what it does, but it's taken cells I thought were dead and brought them back to full service.

I gave up on complete standardization: I figure that having a range of sizes is actually a plus, for when you come across either unfamiliar equipment which needs feeding, or can only find some sizes in the store. I have one set of everything which runs on AAA, and another set which runs on AA.

I tried to standardize on AA's only, mainly because of the advantages of the lithium cells--light weight, long shelf life, large storage capacity (relatively). Unfortunately, two essential items in my kits take AAA's only...my Tikka/Zipka's and my Sony FM/AM/TV/Weather radio. I really wish that the manufacturers of this kind of equipment would realize that the vastly greater power capacity of the AA's over the AAA's makes the AAA cell rather useless in comparison.

For example, an Energizer AA is rated at about 2850mAh versus 1250mAh for an Engergizer AAA. That means a AA packs about 2.28 times as much energy as a AAA!

It should also be mentioned that I try not to rely too much on battery powered devices. You can only carry so many batteries. But here's what I do have:

AA's
2ea Motorola Talkabout 6250 GMRS/FRS radios (and an FCC license, to boot)
1ea Sony ICF-SW7600G shortwave radio
various lights (CMG's, Mag's)

AAA's
1ea Petzl Zipka (and/or Tikka, I have one of each)
1ea Sony SRF-M37V FM/AM/TV/Weather radio

At least, that's the important stuff--but then, of course, there's the cell phone (proprietary Li-Ion) and the Photon's (lithium coin cells); however, in the first case, I don't expect the cell phone to last longer than a day, and in the other, the coin cells are small and light enough not to be a bother.