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I live in East San Diego County, and due to high Santa Ana wind conditions, SDG&E decided to cutoff our electricity from Wednesday evening until Friday noon.

I have a small gas generator that I use to power the fridge (and not lose food in the freezer) and keep the satellite TV going, but it's not big enough to power the whole house. Yes, I could have just played our Baldwin acoustic...but hey, might as well see how the Casio does on batteries.

I got about an hour (at high volume) out of a set of rechargeable Eneloops, and about 45 minutes from 6 standard Kirkland AA's. Just enough to keep the fingers limber during the shutdown.
Surprisingly easy to get to the batteries and swap them out; one thing nice about a 25 lb. keyboard.

Still no complaints about my much-maligned Casio PX-S3000

That's a great option to have in those circumstances!

But I thought rechargable batteries where officially a no-go because of a lower voltage or something like that. I believe you can actually lose your warranty if you use them. (or admit that you used them if the dp fails.) But it seems in the real world it just works fine, well at least for you that seems to be the case!

I took a look at the owner's manual, no warning not to use them. Probably won't have to run on batteries again unless our unfriendly local utility company decides to cut off power to 88,000 people again.

Glad to hear you made it OK, trooplew. I live further west and only had power out for about 18 hours. Still, you know how human nature is. I sat down at my acoustic piano and couldn't stop thinking about really wanting to play my synth at the other end of the room.

I have Casio PX5S and it runs fine on the rechargeable (Amazon Basics). Rav Power PB14 gives about 8 hours; your 3000 should do this as well. I returned my 3000 due to short fulcrum, be bop playing style, long fingers, and the resultant fatigue. My PX5S doesn't have that issue and is great to play on.

How could lower Voltage do any damage?

Compared to disposables, Eneloops are rated slightly lower voltage but deliver more power due to lower inner resistance.
I use dozens of them since they came up for small flashes which are really demanding. They recharge (the flash) even faster than disposables.

Eneloops are quite another thing than that classic nc rechargable rubbish. You will need no more disposables for any application.
But use a proper charger.


-Rhodes74

Well yeah, I had a feeling all would be fine with rechargable batteries, but I read a whole thread about it somewhere and people strongly advised against it.

I think disposables also kind of defeat the purpose of a highly portable dp for alot of people. Which busker would want to have to spend money on new batteries all the time?

Disposable batteries may have a higher initial voltage, but it slowly goes down when you drain them.

Rechargable batteries may start with a lower initial voltage but maintain it at a somewhat steady level until they suddenly die. I guess this is typical to NiMH at least.

As a hypothetical example a device might officially want a 1.5V battery, but actually need only 1.0V to work, so a rechargable battery with an actual voltage of e.g. 1.2V is just fine. As is a somewhat worn out disposable one as it reaches 1.2V.

If the electronics designers at Casio are competent, they have protected the electronics from low voltage by simply switching everything off at a level that's still safe.

Some sort of memory could corrupt in a low voltage induced "brownout". (That's what they call it in the business. I don't know if it's 💩 inspired. 😄)

(I'm not an electronics expert.)

When battery voltage gets low enough the device simply doesn't work. No damage.

Regardless of the battery type, and regardless of its initial voltage ... the voltage will drop with use.
So what? That's been happening with every battery-operated device for the past century.
No worries.

Note that this applies only to batteries, not to AC power. One of the worst things you can do to any electronic device (and stuff like refrigerators as well) is to under-power them.

To the best of my knowledge, brownout is based on blackout. If it's a blackout, the power's off completely. A brownout has the power still being fed at a lower than normal level.