Thanks to bitbox and their comprehesive battery test at www.batteryshowdown.com, the following is a detailed test to find the best AA batteries you can buy for your money on the highstreet and online.

The following results are from the www.batteryshowdown.com High Drain test, as this best matches the heavy load on the batteries that our motors would use.

Results: High Drain

The high-drain discharge of 1000mA is designed to represent a typical heavy load on a battery that a digital camera or similar power-hungry device may use. All batteries suffer a reduction in available capacity when placed under heavy load, but some perform better than others.

Performance Graphed

Click any graph to see a larger preview.

Analysis

In this test some of the lesser well known discount alkalines did not do as well. However, the Kodak Xtralife and Polaroid Super Alkaline batteries did quite well compared to their more expensive cousins and represent excellent value for money. The Kodak cell was also the winner of the 200mA test in terms of value for money.

Zinc cells did very poorly, but this was expected as the chemistry is not optimised for high drain applications. The Panasonic cell didn’t even manage 100mAh.

The Poundland Duracell (genuine Duracell batteries; Duracell Standard in the below data) performed poorly, and you would be better off with the Kodak Xtralife that Poundland also sell in 6 packs.

It’s hard to see how Duracell can market their Duracell Ultra Power battery as being the best they have made, especially at the price it is sold at, because it performed worse in both 200mA and 1000mA tests than their own Duracell Plus Power - which is 31p a battery cheaper! Like in the 200mA test, the Duracell Ultra Power is the worst value for money battery we tested.

Duracell PROCELL and Energizer Industrial are very good batteries for the price and compare well to their retail cousins. However, they are only available from online resellers in boxes of 10.

The Energizer Ultimate Lithium and VARTA Professional Lithium cells performed very well, achieving more than 2800 mAh each with the Energizer beating the VARTA cell by approximately 150mAh. Clearly, these batteries perform very well under high discharge current – they only lost around 250mAh due to the higher current. At this discharge current these lithium cells seem like better value for money but still cost more than the cheaper alkalines. They could be useful in a digital camera application as changing batteries may cause the photographer to lose a shot. They are much cheaper per Ah and Wh than many premium alkaline cells.

Like in the 200mA test, the VARTA High Energy Alkaline was the best performing alkaline cell and bore its claims of being very long life. However, it provided only marginally more lifetime than the Energizer Industrial cell for 2x the price.

Similar to the last test the major disappointment was the Panasonic EVOLTA. It claims Panasonic’s own “Platinum Award” (for unknown reasons), and previously claims to hold a Guinness World Record for “Longest Lasting AA Alkaline Battery in a Wide Range of Devices”. For an alkaline cell, this battery performed the worst in this test, as well as in the 200mA test.

Raw Data

¹ Yes, these are genuine Ford Motor Company AA batteries.