How Well Do Battery Upsizers Work?

One of the neatest little gadgets to come along in years are battery upsizers. There are a variety of manufacturers of these devices but they are essentially all about the same in design. Battery upsizers work by fitting inside each other, like Russian dolls, so that you can make an AAA battery into an AA battery, an AA battery into a C, battery, etc. You can upsize batteries from AAA all the way to D cell size. How is this possible you might ask? The different sizes of batteries all share the same voltage, 1.5 volts.

Why Battery Upsizers Are So Handy

Everyone has found themselves in this situation. You need a battery for a flashlight, remote control, etc, and you have a whole drawer full of the wrong size batteries. If you have a battery upsizer, and if the size you need is larger, all you have to do is put the smaller battery in an upsizer, or then into another one, and so on, until you have the size you need. Battery upsizers can also prevent wasted batteries which might have remained in the drawer for months unused.

You can usually find battery upsizers that cover sizes from AAA to D for under $15. This may be money well spent if you consider that it could save you a trip to the store on game day should your remote require an AA battery, and all you have on hand are AAA. Likewise, during a power outage they'll give you more versatility to run battery powered devices with the batteries you might already have on hand. In my opinion battery upsizers are one of those "gadgets" that are well worth the money.

Below is a very "cheesy" video from a pitch man, describing how one brand of battery upsizers works.

The downside of using battery upsizers is that batteries are sized differently for a reason. The larger the battery, typically the more amperage it's capable of. A normal alkaline D cell battery typically has about 8 amp hours and an AA battery contains only about 2 amp hours of energy. Thus, with larger batteries comes a bigger supply of energy. The difference is very small between AAA and AA batteries, so you can easily upsize this size battery with little loss of longevity. You'll notice that upsized D batteries that started with AAA will not last nearly as long as regular D batteries. Devices that require a lot of amperage to start them up, such as motorized toys, etc, may not work well with batteries upsized from AA or AAA, but may work fine when the upsizing is only from size C to D. However, if you just need to power a flashlight in an emergency and have a bunch of AAA or AA batteries around, you can get by with upsizing all the way from AAA to D to get some use of these devices. Also, with rechargeable batteries, you can't use battery upsizers in a charger, which is another drawback.