9.6V battery in 9V devices...?

Anyone know if it will damage many/any devices if you replace a 9V battery with a 9.6V battery?
Especially -- what about a multimeter that is supposed to be powered by a 9V?

My main concern is that i checked the voltage on one of my 9.6V batteries fresh off the charger and it is 11.78V.

I am sorry for my English.
If I got it : I don't think that malfunction caused by 0.6 v because most electronics device components can support this difference on that voltage .
maybe you replaced rechargeable battery that charged at higher voltage than 9.6v.
if your device have Regulator part so you should repair that.

Yeah, that's the reason i wonder if it will work (the high voltage of a freshly-charged 9.6V battery). I should have been more clear in my first post... (i'll add that now).

It will tolerate if it do not contain sensitive component like microcontrollers, sensors etc ... But if it have sensitive components then they will be either damaged or they will provide you wrong/erroneous functions.....
for a multimeter such difference doesn't matter.

Thank you, but don't most multimeters have microcontrollers in them?

for 9.6V they can easily tolerate such a small difference....

but for 11.78V let me tell you for instance:

one of my teachers noted and shared with us that the small pocket transistor radios operating with 6V when operated with 9V, it operated well with 9v but after that when he tried to operate it with 6V again the Radio just refused to operate :-( .... its demand was 9V from then ... i dont know why... but may be due to development of carbon in the resistors increase their resistance and make them unable to operate with 6V further.............

however ... which kind of rechargable battery are you using??? i think you measured its off load voltages.. measure the battery onload by connecting it with any 9V or 10V load and then check its voltage if they are dropped from 11.78v to some small value near 9.5V or not. if it do so; these batteries are safe to use with your multimeter.

That might be fixed with (say) a LM78L09 or better yet an LDO
capable of ~15V inline with the battery. But it will bleed some
current unless it's inboard of a hardware power switch (an
electronically controlled power management might be VBAT
sensitive).

I'd eyeball the internal board, may be that the first thing is
a regulator anyway and its voltage rating could be good
enough. 9V is not really a popular choice for ICs, just for
batteries.

Thanks. I measured the current draw of one of my multimeters, and it's only 0.46mA on most ranges.
Draining 0.46mA on my NiMH battery (11.78V) does not drop the voltage at all.
I also couldn't find any voltage regulators inside the multimeter.

I checked out the PCB in the multimeter, and the positive rail from the battery goes straight to the main IC (and it's the only IC).
I'm guessing 11.78 volts may be a bad idea.

Can you see the IC markings and chase down the datasheet?

Good idea, but it has a glob of black epoxy covering the whole IC.

I am hesitate to tell you that your multimeter was damaged and i don't think that you able to repair that.
So you should provide a better multimeter .
Regards.

No, it's fine. There are lots of devices out there with an IC covered in epoxy. I think they do it, because there are really tiny wires going from the IC leads to traces on the PCB (i think i heard it's used to circumvent reverse engineering too?).

lee321987 said:

Anyone know if it will damage many/any devices if you replace a 9V battery with a 9.6V battery?
Especially -- what about a multimeter that is supposed to be powered by a 9V?

My main concern is that i checked the voltage on one of my 9.6V batteries fresh off the charger and it is 11.78V.

Click to expand...

It's typical even for a new 9V alkaline battery to read higher than 9V. Up to 9.6.

Rechargeables can soar to a high figure by the end of a fast charge. Above 1.6V.

After 24 hours I see my rechargeables settle to 1.37 or so.

So your 7-cell battery will settle to 9.6.

You might test the tester. Give the meter a reference input (say,
a 1.5V alkaline cell on 2V scale, or maybe put it in resistance mode
with a 1K). Feed it with a power supply where you can observe
current draw.

Run the power supply up incrementally from 9V and record the
panel reading (1.5xx) and current draw.

You would be looking for a point where the reading deviates
from nominal by an unacceptable amount (say, 0.1%) or the
supply current, say, has doubled from the 9V baseline.

The former indicating an accuracy / PSRR issue, the latter
potential reliability stress.