Boots! Huh !*+*!~##**!!!£!*#! (Boots Wet and Dry Rechargeable Ladyshave)

Member Name: sidneygee

Product:	Boots Wet and Dry Rechargeable Ladyshave
Date:	22/11/01 (338 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Works well

Disadvantages: For 3 years, Then "dispose of carefully"

Christmas comes but once a year .. thank goodness !!!. Being married for getting on for 28 years, buying presents for my 'nearest & dearest' is always a problem. After all, whatever Heather wants, well ... within reason she can have it. "Just go out and put it onto the credit card" I say .. so that trying to buy an acceptable present that she actually "needs" does present a problem each Christmas. Birthdays are different - and easy - large bunch of flowers and a restaurant visit will normally suffice ... but Xmas is a perennial problem.

However in 1998, I thought I had the problem well-and-trully 'sussed'. You see I had picked up a Boots catalogue and my elder daughter had then told me that Heather had expressed an interest in the Boots "Wet & Dry Rechargeable Ladyshave", as an alternative to her Philips Ladyshave that was about 10 years' old and mains powered .. and always being 'borrowed' all the time by the daughters. The rechargeable one could also be taken into the shower, you see....

Well, a wink is as good as a nod to a blind S*d, so for the exorbitant payment of £28.95, the item was bought, wrapped up and secreted under the Xmas tree. Delight from Heather on the day and we all lived happily ever-after ... Oh I wish !!!

OK, it was never abused, always allowed to discharge before being re-charged - NiCad (Nickel-Cadmium) batteries, you see, and all went reasonably well until this summer, when Heather started saying "That shaver you bought me.....".

Well it had seemingly lost a bit of power. I was NOT flavour of the month when I suggested that her 'beard' was getting tougher with old age.

(OWWWWCH - that was my ear you clipped !!)..

So, eventually, a week or so ago, it stopped completely. Worked after a fashion one day, then nothing ! Checked the documents - two year guarantee (expired), so obviously it needed a new re
chargeable battery pack ... er .. Nowt about that in the instructions ... Ah yes a section entitled "REMOVAL of the Rechargeable Cells" that started:

"At the end of the product's useful life ..."

End ? I thought, it hasn't ended, surely - just needs a new battery pack ... But No, the message was there - loud and clear ... " Disconnect wires and separate batteries from motor etc. ... Put motor and other metal parts into the metal recycling bank ... Dispose of batteries under local council direction ...". Oh, and obviously go and buy another from Boots.

So, the throw-away society is alive and well and being promoted by Boots ?

"Anyway", said Heather "Don't think that you are getting away with just buying me another shaver for Xmas". Obviously it must have been something I said .....

BUT Huh !! It takes more than the recalcitrance of the designers of a Boots shaver to defeat the S*ds of this world, so I thought.

So I opened the plastic case. Just the one battery ... AA size .. re-chargeable 1.2 volts... but NOT the sort that can just be popped in and out .... one with metal tags at the end that were soldered in, and an electrical resistor in the circuit soldered to one of the terminals ..... hmmmm .... but no obvious way of removing the battery, because of the tag on the negative terminal being soldered to the resistor deep in the mechanism ... and no way of getting the whole gubbins out of the plastic case without breaking it.

But ... by pushing the whole assembly to one side and using the smallest soldering iron in my possession (a Draper rechargeable cordless soldering iron), I was able to access down the side of the case and unsolder the tag from the resistor - and out it came. So, I have a spent NiCad Battery, a resistor, and the rest of the equipment.

Why a resistor? Well, a quick check of the charger unit, with my tru
sty multi-meter ... 4 volts output, so the resistor was there to reduce the voltage down to 1.2 volts.

Maplins to the Rescue
There are many advantages of living in Edinburgh - and one of them is that there is a branch of Maplins on the outskirts of the City centre. For those of you not familiar with this chain of stores - it is the ideal place to buy odd electrical and electronic nick-knacks. And they produce a catalogue every 6 months - about 800 pages long and costing £3.95. you don't need to buy every issue - just one every two or three years.

You can also but a CD ROM, or access the catalogue via the web. Try www.maplin.co.uk. They are THE place, for example to buy watch batteries ... spade connectors ... DJ Mixers .... Alcohol Breath testers ... such a range .. and they have very good special offers available monthly, which they will email you about. Unfortunately there is a delivery charge of £3.50 for orders under £30.

Yup - there is EXACTLY what I need, at £2.45 each (cat. no. VN39N) - an AA size 1.2 volts NiCad battery with tags, and a quick telephone call to the Edinburgh branch in Dalry Road confirmed that they had it in stock, and a simple detour to buy. Soldering the resistor to the negative end (with a slight re-routing of the wires) and the wire to the tag at the positive end. Popped it on charge - and the following morning - one delighted Heather - it was working, and with more power than she could ever recall.

It was then that I checked the old battery.

Re-chargeable batteries are rated in milli-ampere-hours - I suppose the number of milli-amperes that can be discharged over 1 hour when fully charged. The old battery was 600 mA/hr; the new 950 mA/hr. So more power and a longer battery life.

Makes you wonder .... doesn't it ?

Sudden thought ... could the charger over-heat because the battery might have a different internal resistance to the old one ... well i
f it has, then it is not appreciable, because no signs of excessive warming when on charge.

But all those problems because of a simple design fault. If the shaver had been designed with rechargeable battery without tags, and the resistor included in an internal circuit .. it would have produced a greener product and lasted so much longer than the 3 years they were anticipating.

Following up
1 Well, I have emailed Boots protesting about this cavalier attitude to recycling.

2 I have emailed the Council asking what I should do with the dud NiCad battery.

3 I took photographs of the whole exercise.
After all, this is a good example of poor engineering design. My son is studying engineering atm, and it is likely that such examples of poor design can be useful.

4 I have gained more in Brownie points with Heather, particularly when I poo-poo-ed
the idea that I was even remotely considering buying her another shaver for Xmas....

(DRAT - back to the drawing board !).


© Sidneygee 2001

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