Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I still dislike electron movement

So I have this nice mouse. It's wireless. It also runs on battery power. The AA batteries to be exactly (those are the big cylinder ones yes?) Sadly my household supply of AA batteries is limited to broken rechargeable ones. Broken meaning they don't recharge anymore.

So I started using AAA batteries (the little cylinder ones). I figured it works just as well since it's the basic same setup of a galvanic cell, just smaller and therefore lasts for a shorter amount of time. But the AAA batteries still recharge, so I had a basically limitless supply of them.

This still got me wondering why the hell my AA batteries weren't recharging when the charger clearly worked for the AAA batteries. Given my first year knowledge of galvanic cells, I could come to no conclusion. I was throughly confounded and too lazy to search it up on google (searching is easy, reading the result of the search requires time).

Then I tried to put both batteries on the charger to see what would happen. And I noted that my my previous observation was incorrect. In fact neither batteries charged. So I suppose this means they aren't broken, but the charger has some problem.

This makes me VERY tempted to create my own charger, just grab some silver and zinc per say... As long as I get the electrons to flow in the other direction for a while right? Even if I'm wrong it'll be an interesting experiment.

-Results-

So I used the normal lemon set-up:


Of course it totally failed but that might be because I mixed up my anode and cathode... zinc is the cathode yes? And so the plus end of the battery should be with copper since I'm trying to do the reverse reaction for the battery yes? Maybe if I actually took sometime to sit down and think about it I would have a better idea, for now I'll just exhaust my household supply of charged AAA batteries.

This just in: my charger actually does work, apparently the dead battery I got from it was only charging for an hour or so. Silly parents changing the batteries on the charger w/o telling me... 

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