We have found the quality of retail silver oxide batteries to be highly variable. The batteries we supply are well suited to InfoCrank as they maintain full operating voltage until nearly empty.
A complaint we all have with many of our electrical products relates to the storage and drainage of our batteries. Verve tests many cranks that come in for service or refurbishment in relation to battery usage, but rarely do we get to run a full continuous running test. Our tests generally indicate that the power electronics are not draining batteries beyond the planned specs, yet we acknowledge that batteries sometimes deteriorate faster than any of our models. You can read more on our battery drainage test in the attached pdf.
We can only recommend one of two things:
- Buy your batteries from reputable dealers who constantly have new stock
- Buy them from Verve if you live within the zone where transport is not too much of a problem (Airlines and couriers are often refusing to transport batteries, and not discriminating even though the problems are with different batteries to those used in InfoCrank®.)
What batteries do you use? We supply OEM quality Renata 357 (SR44) silver oxide batteries with all purchases of InfoCrank®. We know when the batteries were manufactured and packaged and generally they last as seen in the test attached.
However, in the day to day operation of our business (taking into account the problems with transporting and packaging batteries) we often buy from bulk dealers at very competitive prices. In this case, we tend to use the predominant “work-house” brand in the region. For instance, in the EU we often use Varta.
What battery problems do you see most often? Most regularly, we find that the wrong battery type was inserted into the InfoCrank®. LR44 batteries not only run down in a different way to SR44 batteries, but often are smaller (height) and so “bounce” around inside the cavity doing damage to the interior.
Another major problem is the false readings that show on your bike computer. In this case, the computer indicates that the battery level is low – normally the right crank, because it is the slave crank – and does not correct when the voltage level returns to the correct level. This often means that the rider is concerned that their batteries are low much earlier than they actually are.
This is compounded by the problems with certain bike computers to lose pairing after a battery change and not restore until the bike computer has been unpaired and then repaired. Meanwhile, many riders think the InfoCrank® has a problem.