Vintage Battery Ads and Reviews

Were Varta and Daimon available over here in the UK? Dont recall ever seeing them.

 

Don't talk to me about Varta . They killed my first Casio CZ101 by leaking all over the circuit board. They had only been in there about a year and weren't even flat. That was around 2000 although they had been around for far longer.

They are actually still selling them in Screwfix https://www.screwfix.com/p/varta-longlife-power-aa-high-energy-batteries-24-pack/3215k

I have just remembered that the PCB mounted rechargeables with a habit of ruining old computer motherboards are usually Varta.

I have never heard of Daimon (except the racing driver) .

 

Were there any other outlets apart fromScrewfix that sold them. Never seen them anywhere.

 

Screwfix are selling them today.

I would guess I first saw Varta in the local Gateway supermarket back in the 1970s.
The local hardware store sold Eveready including torches, bike lamps etc.
The cheap SP batteries were blue Blue. The more expensive High Power HP batteries were Orange.

Other brands I recall seeing were

• Duracell - sold as a premium brand back then with policy that if they leaked an damaged your equipment they would repair it - How times have changed. Yesterday I took a leaking Duracell battery out of a clock that had only just started losing time.
• Vidor
• Ray-O-Vac - I still have a small number of their rechargeable Alkalines
• Berec

Yesterday I was reading a 1980s review of a Sony 2001 shortwave radio and they suggested you buy shares in Berec (as it used them quite quickly.

A brand I don't remember from the past is Energizer. Doing some research to try and work out when they appeared I found
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energizer
It seems they now own Ray-O-Vac, Varta, and Eveready so it isn't surprising you don't see the other brands much. Maybe they are using Varta as a "professional" brand for industrial use.

The brands you will find in a store like B&M these days are Duracell, Energizer, and Panasonic - another brand I don't recall seeing in the 20th century. Panasonic might be used under licence. I just remembered that Sony batteries were common ten years ago but I haven't seen any for a while.

You are more likely to find Hyundai, Daewoo, or JCB these days. Read the small print and you will see that those names are just "used under licence" which is the same with the Energizer light bulbs I bought which keep blowing.

What a tangled web or brand names.

 

This will bring back some memories for anyone who was in the U.K. in the 1980s.
It also solves a mystery of whether we had Eveready (like on cheap light bulbs today), or as shown Ever Ready