Amazon Basics Alkaline AA (2024)

Verdict

Budget batteries have a poor reputation, but the Amazon Basics Alkaline AA fight back. These batteries offer excellent performance, particularly in my high-drain tests, displaying quality you’d expect from bigger names. A low price and option to buy these batteries in huge quantities makes these some of the best batteries you can buy.

Introduction

Budget battery brands are always something that I’ve avoided in the past, because in my experience you end up with poor quality batteries that don’t last long. The Amazon Basics Alkaline AA are different. Yes, they’re cheap, but they offer excellent value. They’re available in a huge range of sizes, right up to 100 batteries – and, importantly, they perform brilliantly.

According to Amazon, the batteries come with a 10-year shelf life, an air- and liquid-tight seal, and they’re built to cover a wide range of tasks, from low-drain (remotes and the like) to high-drain (lights and so on).

Performance

• Excellent and even performance from all batteries
• High capacity
• Excellent high-drain performance

Amazon doesn’t quote any battery life figures for its batteries, simply stating that these batteries deliver “the amount of power needed for a specific device; ideal for game controllers, toys, flashlights, digital cameras, clocks, and more”. That’s really what all batteries do. So, on to the tests.

To test batteries, I use an Ansmann Energy XC3000, which has a drain test operating at 600mA (+/- 20%). I bought a set of the Amazon Basics Alkaline AA and then picked four random batteries from the box for testing.

Running the test until the batteries registered 0.94V, the Amazon Basics Alkaline AA batteries averaged 1376mAh – the second-highest result I’ve seen. Impressively, all four batteries put in similar results, with little variance between them.

I leave alkaline batteries to rest for a few hours, allowing them to cool down, before re-testing to see if there’s any residual capacity. On a second drain, I got an additional 219mAh, which makes for a total tested capacity of 1595mAh in my test – and puts these batteries second overall.

Note that overall capacity does vary based on load, so these batteries would likely have higher capacity if tested under a lower load. The overall load shown here should demonstrate that these batteries will last a good amount of time in lower-drain items, such as remote controls.

I tested the starting voltage, too. On average, the batteries were 1.52V, which is slightly above the 1.5V basic starting point that I’d expect from alkaline batteries. Of course, voltage drops off as the batteries drain.

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