Eee PC Super Battery

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eeebat.jpgA quick review for our friends over at liliputing.com. I just received my 12000mAh battery from DealExtreme and I thought a few pics and comments were in order:

UPDATE: We do not recommend this battery at this time!

As you can see in the pics the battery does add some significant bulk and lift to my 1000HA (standard mouse included for size reference), but it almost doubles the capacity of the standard 6 cell battery – impressive since many netbooks come with only a 3 cell battery standard and 6 cells are the “extended life” batteries.  Also at $62 this battery is a deal considering that similar long life batteries can approach $200.

My fairly accurate scale supports the manufacturer’s weight claims as the new battery upped my Eee PC from 3.2 lbs to 3.75 lbs.  This is still lighter than most ultra portable notebooks but hefty for a netbook.  However, this combo will give you the most battery bang for your netbook buck as you can own the 1000HA (with 6 cell bat) and the super extended battery for under $500, which until recent holiday deals started dropping was cheaper than several netbooks with a 3 cell battery.

eeebat2.jpgMy initial thoughts on the supersized battery are as follows:  The increased typing incline is too much when the netbook is used on a table.  This is largely a personal preference but for me: while I can type with speed and accuracy at that tilt, I find it uncomfortable.  And wrist discomfort doesn’t jive well with “all day computing”. However, I tend to do most of my typing with my wireless keyboard/notebook/netbook in my lap.  Used this way the battery does not create an uncomfortable position as the battery (mostly) fits between my legs.

As for battery life, I will have to use the battery more to be able to determine the real life increase for the extended bat.

One other important note for would be DealExtreme shoppers: this battery is shipping from Hong Kong.  This was a detail that I didn’t realize until I went to check the package tracking as it’s not really mentioned (that I saw) on the site.  So realize that when you opt for the free shipping.  It took 13 calendar days for my new toy to arrive.

UPDATE 11/18: After getting less than expected results from Windows battery estimate for this super sized battery, I set about running some simple real world drainage tests. These tests confirmed XP’s estimates.  The “super” battery was at or below the capacity of the standard 6 cell battery.  Those results didn’t make any sense.  While I fully expected a real world result that was less than the manufacturer’s claimed 81% increase – I certainly expected a battery of twice the size and weight to have a significant level of added capacity.

Needing something else to prove or disprove these battery life numbers, I turned to Battery Eater Pro (which is a handy app, tho it could use a tad more documentation).  I ran their classic test (max power burn) as I was really more interested in a comparison of the two batteries than an artificial “real world use estimate”.  The classic test is also the fastest to run, since it is a worst case test. I then reran the tests in the hopes that perhaps cycling the big battery would help its capacity.  It did not.

The standard battery lasted 33% longer than the super extended battery in the stress tests.  This backs up the capacity estimates generated by Battery Eater’s battery “info” screen that had the standard bat at 10% more capacity than the extended bat:

Supersized Battery:
Manufacturer Claimed: 12000mAh
Battery Eater Estimate: 6946mAh

6 Cell Batt
Manufacturer Claimed: 6600mAh
Battery Eater Estimate: 7625mAh

Now it’s entirely possible our battery was defective and that these numbers are not generally true.  Once the the extended battery has been exchanged we’ll run more tests, but in the meantime: we can’t recommend anyone purchases this product.

UPDATE 11/22:  I am rapidly realizing my purchase from Deal Extreme was a mistake.  After asking for an exchange on their double capacity battery that doesn’t last as long as the standard battery, I got this response (four days later):

Sorry for the trouble.

Would you please login our website and scan the review and forum, which are written by our kind customers. Maybe you can find something useful for the defective item, maybe just the reason why it does not work.

Thanks a lot for your patience.

A) I did this (mainly for a “good faith effort” on my part) and found customer posts requesting verification that this or that battery fit this or that product.  Awesome. Truly helpful.

B) Exactly how could a forum post make my defective battery hold more of a charge?  If such a method exists – I should want to know to use it to increase the capacity of all my batteries.

UPDATE: 12/4/08

After much feet dragging DealExtreme gave me instructions to return the defective battery.  Sent out via UPS today.

UPDATE: 1/8/09

A month later, DealExtreme had neither shipped me a replacement battery nor refunded my money. $70 and several hours of my life: toast.

Do NOT do business with this company!

Has America Waved Goodbye?

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Peter Hitchens has a great piece from a Brit’s perspective on the Obama frenzy and the most likely outcome of the the upcoming “change”. Excerpts below:

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts…

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in.  No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship…

The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

Sec. of Transportation Ignorant About Auto Industry

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Csaba Csere had an excellent column back in July.  Unfortunately C&D is much slower posting their columns than their reviews online – and I am much too lazy busy to re-type it myself.  However it is now up for general viewing and is even more pertinant given the current Auto Industry problems being eyed for government intervention.

I always thought April Fools’ Day came on the first of that month and Earth Day on the 22nd, but apparently, this year those dates were swapped. How else to explain the proposal, on April 22, of Mary E. Peters, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, to accelerate by 25 percent the CAFE increases that Congress enacted last year?

With gasoline pushing four bucks a gallon, it’s not that I would mind seeing average fuel economy rise to 35.7 mpg for cars and 28.6 mpg for trucks by 2015, as Secretary Peters proposes. I’d also like to see a big, happy parade of Sunni, Shiites, and Kurds marching merrily together down Yafa Street in Baghdad. Plus, I’d like to see an eight-figure balance on my brokerage statement and Kelly Brook delivering UPS packages to our office. Sadly, none of these events is any more likely than Secretary Peters’s delusions about CAFE.

Now if you come away from this article dogging old G.W.’s administration (or even blanket Republicans) you are completely missing the bigger point.  This is not a W. is stupid problem – this is a general problem with allowing (trusting?) politicians to fix (meddle?) in problems that they truly know nothing about.  Government can give nudges here and there in attempting to direct the market.  BUT economic forces and moreso laws of physics can not be overcome by legislation – no matter how much you will it to happen, nor how pure your intentions.

A perfect example for this would be the legislation that was passed in the hopes to make home ownership “affordable” to those that couldn’t afford it.  Result? Well it took a while to come home to roost but the noble plan cost us all 700 billion dollars and counting.  Remember that as government promises to solve the next problem with a wave of its legistative hand – or rushes aid those in need.

H-H-Oops

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In the Dec 08 issue of Car & Driver, Franz Kafka attempts to answer a question about HHO with the help of an associate engineering prof.  The two end up completely off point and so butcher the response that a corrective response was required.  Both are below:

HO-HO-HHO
What would happen if you inject HHO (oxyhydrogen) into a gasoline-combustible engine? Oxyhydrogen is a mixture of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (02) gases, typically in a 2:1 molar ratio, the same proportion as water. This gaseous mixture is used for torches for the processing of refractory materials. I have found numerous claims on the Internet (i.e., www.water4gas. com, www.watertogas.com, etc.) that allege mpg savings by installing an HHO injection kit on a common gasoline engine. Thank you for your help, and please consider us working-class schmucks who might buy into this stuff with gas at nearly $5 a gallon!
Brian Gong
Arroyo Grande, California

Sorry, Brian, those claims are bogus, and you need to stop cribbing from Wikipedia. Lest any reader doubt the indomitable authority of Car and Driver, Kafka asked Claus Borgnakke, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. For starters, you won’t gain any energy by converting water to hydrogen and oxygen in the car–you’ll end up with less useful energy than you put in because both the disassociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen and the burning of hydrogen are less than 100 percent efficient in real-world conditions. Even if you did have a perfectly efficient process, there would be no energy left over to power the car. Starting with an oxyhydrogen mix in the car is a bad idea, too. According to Borgnakke, “Never try to store hydrogen and oxygen gas together. Hydrogen is much more dangerous than other fuels in that it burns at nearly all ratios with oxygen and has a very low threshold for ignition.” You could use an energy source such as solar power to make hydrogen from water, but that’s not cost effective, and you’re still left with the problem of storage. Kafka will leave the last word to our expert, who says, “Hydrogen is still too costly to store and transport compared with gasoline or diesel fuel.”

-Franz Kafka’s Garage

My response:

Kafka

Your HHO response in Dec 08 is so busy feigning intelligence that you miss the fact that the specific laws of physics you snobbishly explain – don’t apply to the question at hand: HHO does not claim to create energy out of thin air.  It simply allows more efficient use of the available energy contained in the gasoline.

1) Gas engines divert a constant amount of energy to the alternator that is converted to electrical energy (yes at less than 100% efficiency).  That energy if unused is soon wasted attempting to overcharge the battery.  HHO draws from this waste power to separate the water into its component gases not to “create energy”,  but as a safe, cost effective way to store the dangerous hydrogen.  Only small amounts of the gas ever exist out of the water state as they are fed into the car as created.

2) The Hydrogen gas adds a nominal amount of energy to the fuel air mixture.  Again, energy is not being created here by violating physics any more than pouring an octane booster into your gas tank.  Water, however, does tend to be cheaper than those fancy additives.  However, much like those additives, the energy boost is small as it would take a tremendous amount of hydrogen gas alone to power a car.

3) The real trick behind HHO is the added oxygen in the fuel air mixture.  It is well understood that more oxygen in the engine means more power potential.  Many after market parts exist to pump cooler air or shove more air into your engine for the express purpose of increasing the oxygen amount in the combustion chamber. Where, oh Kafka, are your snide remarks at those products?

The added oxygen increases the percentage of gas burning inside your engine instead of exiting your tail pipe. Again, energy is not being created, rather less fuel (energy) is being wasted.  This increased efficiency translates into more power at the same gas input or better fuel economy at the same power output.  Herein lies the second caveat to HHO: modern oxygen sensors.  While older cars can bolt on HHO and forever enjoy increased efficiency, newer cars will only see improved MPG for a short period until the oxygen sensors compensate with increasingly rich fuel mixtures until the gains are offset.  So if one wants to run HHO in a current vehicle they must also be prepared to alter their O2 sensors with one of the variety of after market methods available.

Perhaps a senior professor could check this one for you.
Scott