The forbidden frosted sugar.

It has happened enough times to me being really aware of removing batteries of any device that does not see constant use

Sure, dust out with a paintbrush...wipe down with some alcohol. If the contacts are corroded either file or use a dot of lemon juice and a toothbrush to remove and then either spray with contact cleaner or wipe again with alcohol.

If you have access to one, use an ultrasonic cleaner with vinegar and water in it to clean the parts you can take out (NOT the batteries themselves! Those are done)

yeah it tastes like donut creme

As a millennial: all the time

What I did only experience once, was a leaking alkaline battery while in use

Mouse stopped working. Opened it up, only to be greeted with freshly squeezed battery juice dripping out of the battery

Mouse worked fine with new batteries, so no short in there.

Was even high end Duracell

high end Duracell

This has become an oxymoron in the last few decades.

Acid is just upside-down base

Yes? It was extremely common as a child because all our toys were battery powered (but not included)

Completely empty? You're sure that there isn't any juice left? I haven't tried opening a leaky one, but I'd guess that there's still at least a few drops left.

Bought out by berkshire hathaway in 2016 and they've been absolute garbage since then. I haven't bought them for years, they aren't worth anything.

Oh my sweet summer child... Just don't taste it.

In the future, someone will have this same story but the ending will be the toy telling you to connect to WiFi and update your subscription information...

It doesn't.

CRC is a hydrocarbon based cleaning solution similar to isopropyl alcohol. Vinegar works to clean the alkaline corrosion specifically because it is acidic, so it will both neutralize the alkalinity and also act as a mild etchant.

It is important that you thoroughly clean all of the vinegar, since leaving it on for too long will etch away the copper (though when I say "for too long", I mean a very long time).

I remember hearing that alkaline batteries that contain mercury don't leak, they're just much worse for the environment. So maybe that's what happened?

Yeah I just threw out half of a 30 pack of procells because they look like this. Expiry date is next year.

That just sounded factual.

Yes that's what they're called alkaleaks.

how old are you?

Mmm, alkaline

No. I had an OG gameboy and my parents wouldn’t buy more batteries so every remote in the house had its batteries liberated for the glory of super Mario land 2 6 golden coins. They didn’t get the safety and security of rotting in a tv remote. They were fed to the Tetris vampire.

See now I have to know why.

Now that I think about it, that’s about when I switched to energizer. Were they owned by berk?

False. Alkaline batteries are never completely empty. They are just too low to be used for what they are in. Move them to another device and they again.

The heat death of the universe will be delayed by a bag of AA’s in a landfill

Energizer is not owned by berkshire.

Why not just switch to NiMH rechargables? Upfront cost is a bit higher, but considering the 10 or so year lifespan in a TV remote, they make sense. And they don't leak.

Gen Z too.

I hate to be counted as a gen z because my mind is less there and more inbetween.
Anyway, I think people forgot how genz starts at 1997. People. Some were 10 years old in the 2000s and al we had were battery toys and outside to play with...

Well, if I cannot operate an IR remote anymore I consider the batteries empty because I won't be able to do anything else with them. I'll dispose of them properly, but I won't tell you ;-)

Running a gameboy on non-rechargeable batteries is a bold choice.

If the words on the batteries read the same way, it will cause acidic fuzz like this.

* They may have been correctly inserted, and then left a long time, which can also cause fuzz.

:(

I should go pull the batteries out of my game boy color because I'd rather not experience this again.

21

and set a reminder to rechage batteries every 3 months.

Ah, the forbidden salt. Yes, I remember it fondly from when I was but a young boy, playing the GameBoy Color.

Yes.

Basically if you leave Alkaline batteries in the device for a long time (years) without using them they will loose all charge and there is a chance of them leaking.

Leakage is significantly more common with the Zinc-Carbon batteries (the tech in use for most batteries in that format before Alkaline) though those leak something that forms blueish crystals.

I once saw old D cells inside the toy train my father had as a kid. They basically looked like they liquefied and then re-solidified in the basic shape of a D cell.

You know, at first glance these looked like 2 dollar bills rolled up to do coke with and these were after a couple of hours of use and the coke was getting gummed up around the snorting side. My first thought was "Yeah, I'm familiar with that."

"who is hungry, thinks of bread"

That explains a lot. The last package of Duracell batteries I bought all died before their expiration date. Store-brand is better than that.

Yeah, get accu cells. More environmentally friendly and they break without running out.

Not really an option everyone had or even knew about back then.

Wow, until you mentioned it, I had somehow completely forgotten about this gem of a game and mostly thought of mario land 1 or wario world when thinking of the gameboy era, even though wario was introduced in Mario Land 2 iirc. Thanks for that hit of nostalgia.

I suspect some (not enshitified) devices even designed around it because I remember it killing devices back in the day but the more recent times I've had it happen, like with a wireless guitar controller, the device was fine, just a bit crusty in the battery area. Though if you've ever opened up a guitar controller, they are mostly empty space, so it might just be the nature of their use case vs something like a gameboy, where everything is packed in as much as the thermal situation allowed.

Every '90s kid remembers this!

Yeap as a reseller happens quite a bit and I found battery that expirebbsck in the 90s in a portable speaker