A battery-life extender has been announced, claiming up to 800 percent additional performance. The company believes it will have a significant impact on disposable energy market and the environment.

The company is Batteroo and the product is Batteriser. What is Batteriser? It's a sleeve that fits over new or most used batteries. It's stainless-steel at less than .1 millimeters thin. Batteriser is reusable. Writing about the Batteriser, Jon Phillips, editor in chief of PCWorld, said, "It's essentially a voltage booster that sucks every last drop of useable energy from ostensibly spent batteries."

Most devices only tap 20 percent of a battery's energy before the device stops functioning, and then the batteries are thrown in the trash— that's a lot considering each year over 15 billion disposable batteries are consumed globally. The company release said that only approximately two percent of these batteries were disposed of properly. Those thrown away lead to "soil contamination and a laundry list of negative environmental impacts."

"When we get a new battery it is 1.5 volts, when we use it in a device it goes down to 1.3 volts under load condition, at that point we consider it to be dead and throw it away," said Dr. Kiumars Parvin, professor of physics at San Jose State University.

Once the product is on, it will tap into the energy that is usually thrown away. "Batteriser lets you tap into the remaining 80 percent of energy," said the company release, with the batteries lasting up to eight times longer.

At work, said the release, is an "intelligent voltage management and delivery mechanism. Batteroo introduces this system in the format of a sleeve that makes contact with the positive and negative ends of a common battery to access untapped remaining energy at a steady state system voltage."

Prof. Parvin said that in a lab test of the sleeve, "we confirmed that the Batteriser taps into the 80 percent of energy that is usually thrown away."

The product will be available for AA, AAA, C, and D-cell batteries. A four-pack of the sleeves will sell for under $10.

Phillips said that while voltage boosters are nothing new, Batteriser is noteworthy in that "it scales down the technology to the point where it can fit inside a stainless steel sleeve less than 0.1 mm thick." That makes it thin enough to fit inside a variety of battery compartments.

The news release said Batteriser in tests was proven compatible on a number of battery-operated home and office gadgets. The range included wireless keyboards, noise-cancelling headphones, Xbox and Wii controllers, TV remote controls, walkie-talkies, digital scales, electric toothbrushes, toys, radios, flashlights and blood-pressure monitors.

At the time of this writing, the Batteriser web site was not available; PCWorld said the product is to go on sale in September.

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