Art

All Alkalines leak, that is one of their faults. If leakage is a concern spend the extra money for lithium or stick with the duracells you are already using. In the rare event that the duracell do start leaking, duracell stands behind their product and will pay for your damaged equipment. I know this from experience. I believe Energerizer reimburses as well.

I did not mean to insult you about discussing equipment. I just thought other members would enjoy the benefits of the arc, because of its ability to take advantage of poor quality or dead batteries and is coated with chemkote to protect itself from corrosion of a leaking battery.

Rayovac's have come up several times in this thread with some reviling them and others recommending them. It is interesting to note that in the testing done by SilverFox (that JohnN pointed out) the Rayovac Max did very well and the Rayovac Heavy Duty, uhm, sucked. I believe the Max is alkaline and the Heavy Duty is not.

I've used Rayovac Max, Energizer and Duracell alkaline batteries without any issues but I prefer Duracell. In lithiums AA's I use Energizer's (as if I had a choice) and in 123s I use Duracell's and SureFire's.

Here is a chart of different battery runtimes in a ARC AAA flashlight. All runtimes are to 50% brightness.

A long time ago, back in my model airplane days, I did some research. At the time Duracell was much better thought of than anything else in terms of both capacity and reliability. I'm glad to see this is still the case, because I continue to buy exclusively Duracell without question.

I've been burned multiple times by rayovac so they have lost my business for good. I bought the renewals when they first came out in the early 90's while I was in college the store I worked for had some really good coupons. I learned to not let them discharge very far and got a couple good years of use from them. Then the charger died so I had to buy another charger. Then a set leaked and ruined a flashlight. Then the new charger died.
Then I started on NiMH in the late 90's and early 2000's. The last renewal charger I had bought would charge both so I was using I for some of my nimh as well until it died. Then I bought a new rayovac nimh charger but the renewal chargers were non existant so I had to toss a whole bunch of renewals and replace them with nimh. Then my nimh started lasting less and less and we were getting frustrated that the digicam would shut down after just a few pictures. I quit using re-chargeables completely and was buying lithium for the hungry digicam.
I then started researching and found out my nice $30 rayovac charger didn't completely charge the batteries so having a fresh off the charger battery that only had 70%-80% capacity. So I bought a decent charger and was able to get all the old batteries working and lasting their normal time.
Then I started buying bulk packs of Alkaline for my gear and as backups. The bulk packs of rayovac were a good price but I started getting leaky batteries right in the pack that were 6 months old as I would buy a new pack and rotate every 6 months.
During this time I also started hearing about low self discharge nimh so I wanted to try them. Sanyo Eneloop was one of them but wasn't out in stores yet and rayovac hybrid was another. I started looking for those and it turned out they had an exclusive deal with walmart for the first year so to buy them I'd have to shop at a terrible store. I ended up waiting for eneloops to come into the stores and they were cheaper than the rayovacs at one store anyway. So I'd stopped buying rayovac and the bulk packs of energizer or duracell Alkalines havent leaked yet and my NiMH are still lasting like they should so I sold the crappy rayovac charger on ebay.
I'll give a company the benefit of the dought, every company makes a bad product every once and a while or comes out with a stupid policy but when they repeatedly have issues they hit my don't deal with list. So rayovac made it there along with AOL, Yahoo, Time Warner, Nextel, Spitzer Dodge, Fram, Apple, etc.

Thanks for the chart. Since the ARC AAA has gone through many changes over time, what era ARC is this?

Everyone should note that batteries perform differently under different loads. So a battery that does really well with low drain applications may not do well for a high drain application. This is why the 'shootout' graphs are run at different amperages.

Also, regulated lights like the ARC try to maintain their output even while the battery output runs down. The algorithm used will impact the output curve. That is to say, even with similar drains, if the lights use a different algorithm, your performance may differ. And regardless, these output curves will differ from a non-regulated device of similar output.

For example, lithium lights tend to do well in high draw applications. They also tend to have a flatter discharge curve. So with a non-regulated light with a higher output level, the lithium cells will blow away any alkaline. But a good regulated light can make the difference less pronounced.

-john

The graph was for the Arc AAA-P with the nichia CS led.

The new DS LED have slightly better runtime and I have not seen anything on the GS version.

here is a chart comparing a DS LED ARC vs CS LED ARC using a ray o vac battery

Art

just to clarify I do not use cheap batteries, I spend the extra money for lithium for the benefits you just stated and others. Maybe if you spent a few dollars you would have not lost a few hundred dollars worth of equipment to battery leakage.

However, If I am in a pinch and I need to use a dead battery or a subpar brand I know the ARC will perform for me when needed and is durable enough to handle most battery leakage that would destroy other types of flashlights. But in the event that it does get destroyed. The ARC has a lifetime replacement warranty.
These are some of the reasons why I said type of equipment is sometimes more important than battery used.

Funny I don't come here much and today I find this thread. I just got about 1,000 mixed AA and 880 nib nimh AA's, for free .

There is a place in my district that recycles all one use cameras. They have trailer loads of batts they send off to a recycler. They are around 85-90 % charged.

They give batts to use firefighters for free. I have used these batts for years, must be dozens of brands, while i never really "tested" them I never really noticed to much differance.

Don't know why they had nib nimh , but they had a few skids of them .