building that drains AA / AAA batteries??

Question

My wife works in an electrical plant were they assemble circuit boards for computers, radios and just about any other electronic device. But her MP3 player or there CD player does not last long even on fresh, brand new batteries. What would cause this and would it harm the body?

Answer 1

Unless you are in an RMI room or an industrial inductive heating chamber, I don't think any electric or magnetic field is strong enough to drain the batteries.

When the ambient digital switching or RF noise level is high, some high quality digital circuits may work harder to reprocess the portion that was noise-corrupted (while the cheaper ones just let you hear the noise). The microprocessors (you could find several of them in an MP3 or a CD player), when detecting an instruction or data checksum fail, would try to re-fetch the same again; and hence would have a smaller fraction of the music-play time to slow down as it would when, say, the audio output stream buffer is full.

When the ambient sound noise level is high, such as generated by the many cooling fans in computers and in electronic equipment on a production floor, the music volume needs to be higher. Higher volume puts more load on the power amps which drain the batteries faster.

For cell phones, when placed into a fade spot, some models may repeatedly try to C/A (clear and acquire) to find link to a nearby base-station, node B, or repeater point. And running the C/A sequences drains the battery typically much faster than going into idle after having established a link and reported its ID to the local cluster manager.

Answer 2

there is some research to suggest that ambient magnetic fields can cause battery drain, but some other environmental factors could be allowing the MP3 player to get hot while she listens to it, operating at higher temperatures can cause batteries to drain faster than normal. Also- accessories like ear phones or bluetooth devices can cause a drain on batteries as well.

Answer 3

Duracell batteries have a built in meter. With other batteries you'll need a digital voltmeter to test them. If the voltage is much below 1.5V (1.4V or less) then it's time for the battery to go to the big re-cycling shop in the sky although batteries will limp on at 1.25V if their in, say, a remote control.

Answer 4

I'm not sure, but have a similar story. In my office building, there are a few offices where the batteries on people's cell phones drain really fast. I think some of our RF labs are located near those people's offices, so that might be the reason.

Answer 5

I would tell her to get rechargeables, and a lot of them. CD players just munch energy from cells. I would highly recommend that she get a player that she can plug in.

Answer 6

It's imagination. The batteries are working as they should