Dallas' Vlog - Can you reallly power anything with a AAA battery?

Stuart Halliday29 August 2010

Dallas, I can't believe you fell for one of those silly articles on web sites like Youtube. Whilst if a AAA battery was fed into a DC-DC converter to make the 1.5V into 5V to power a mobile phone for a short time. You can't do this to power any Mains power device. Surely you guys have access to a electronic engineer who you could have asked before embarrassing yourself? :-) Mind you, I'm amazed at how little people know about electricity and how their gadgets work. Kind of worrying too from a safety point of view. I used to do a test on my apprentices to see if they did understand electricity. I'd take a 12V power supply capable of 10A of current with bare metal probes and I'd bang them together and people would see the large sparks flying from the probes. I'd ask them if they were prepared to touch the live probes. In ten years no apprentice did. But if you understood electricity you'd know that 12V is totally harmless. Only experienced engineers would touch the probes and I'd show the kids that they need to understand electricity if they were going to follow a trade that uses it. Maybe an idea for an article on your show? http://stuarthalliday.com/