In my quest to live a more sustainable life,  I’ve transitioned to rechargeable batteries wherever possible (read more here), and have finally tackled the remaining piece of that puzzle – rechargeable 9V batteries.  I found these to be surprisingly rare, and settled on one of the few options from Amazon, the charger and batteries from Tenergy.

I suppose there’s not much to say about the batteries…and that’s a good thing!  As for the charger, well, it works and charges the batteries, but I was disappointed by the quality.  Tenergy used cheap white plastic that lets a lot of the light through, giving this charger a pink glow when charging (as the attached photo shows).  It doesn’t cost much more to use a more opaque plastic in manufacturing, yet this is something companies need to really fight for when dealing with Chinese manufacturing, at least from my experience.  You can spec out an awesome Lexan from Sabic (formerly GE) that will block like like this, but the factories will want to substitute a cheaper, more readily available one….which I suspect is what happened here.  It doesn’t affect the charger performance so it’s not really a big deal, it’s more of an annoyance of mine to see products built less than optimally.

If you’re looking for something like this, you can find the charger here at Amazon, and a 10-pack of the batteries here.  Don’t think you need a 10-pack?  Take a walk around your house and count the number of smoke detectors you have (should be one per bedroom plus in the common areas of the house), and the CO detectors.  You might be surprised at just how many 9V batteries you need!