Do Voltmeters check battery life of D-Size (Torch) batts?

[xDahlia]

Doing this for a school experiment thingy..

 

[.::5pYd3r::.]

No. I don't think so.

 

[xDahlia]

=\ Sure?..

EDIT: Waiting for more replies, can't trust 5pyd3r for all I know..

 

[enarky]

Short: nope, they don't.

Long: If you know how the battery discharges (in German we say "Entladekurve", IIRC... look for something like a "discharge diagramm") you can make an educated guess on how much capacity is left in the Battery if you know its charge, measured by a Voltmeter. This works better for NiCd Akkus, not so good for NiMH types and even less for Lithium-Ion batteries (all IIRC, of course). If you dig a little deeper you might find out that most battery charge displays in electronic devices work like that, they're inaccurate at best and useless in the worst case.

 

[xDahlia]

Meh. Okay, one more question though. Is there any other way to test the life of the D-Size batteries? >_> Or do I have to wait around for it's life to die. >

 

[enarky]

What exactly do you want to do with it? If it's for a school project I assume you must have gotten *some* instructions on what to do, don't you?

If all you want to find out is if there is *some* charge left in the device you can of course use a Voltmeter - this doesn't tell you anything about quantity, though. D-Size batteries should be somewhere in the region of 1-1.2 V for rechargeable batteries and somewhere around 1.2-1.5 V for single use batteries (alkaline/zinc carbon). If it's much lower than that you can assume that the battery is dead.

 

[kobykaan]

Yeah you can ... you can check virtually any kinda battery within reason so long as your meter can handle it