Battery - Varta AAA 4 Pack

A AAA battery four pack, for everything that needs them. Longlife Extra alkaline AAA at 1.5 volts, in a four pack. Remote controls, wall clocks, torches, keypads, door chimes and the long tail of small things around a house that quietly run flat.

• What actually runs down an AAA battery in a house
• Alkaline is right for low drain
• The dispenser is a small mercy
• Where AAA turns up in a smart home
• The specification

What actually runs down an AAA battery in a house

The long tail of small things nobody thinks about until one of them stops. Remote controls, wall clocks, torches, keypads, door chimes, a bathroom scale, the children thing that beeps. None of them are urgent individually and all of them are annoying at the moment they go, which is why a four pack in a drawer is one of the more sensible small purchases in a house.

Alkaline is right for low drain

These are Longlife Extra alkaline cells, built for a slow steady pull over months rather than a heavy burst. That is exactly what a clock or a remote does, and it is where alkaline outperforms the cheaper zinc carbon batteries by a wide margin. For something that draws hard in short bursts, a lithium cell is the better answer; for a wall clock, this is.

The dispenser is a small mercy

The pack presses out one cell at a time and holds the other three, so they do not end up rolling loose in a drawer mixed with dead ones. Anybody who has stood holding four identical batteries wondering which two are flat will understand why that matters.

Where AAA turns up in a smart home

Two go into the Amazon Fire Stick remote, and into the Chromecast with Google TV remote, the Philips Hue Motion Sensor and the Remotec Scene Master. Streaming remotes in particular get used every evening and go flat without warning.

The specification

1.5 volts, alkaline, four to a pack, made in Germany. Brand varies between deliveries and the specification does not.

If the device you are looking at takes a coin cell rather than a AAA, it is most likely the CR2032. Wikipedia explains how alkaline cells differ from the cheaper chemistry they replaced.