Rechargeable Work Light

Have alkaline batteries become weaker in the last few years?

I am baffled by a problem I have had with battery-operated Christmas lights I bought about three years ago in the UK.
The two sets of lights are identical. There are about a dozen lights (presumably LEDs) in each set.
When I first bought them they worked fine with two alkaline AA-sized batteries for each set. But their performance was poor with rechargeable batteries.
I have just tried the lights again. About half the lights in each set glow normally. The next few are dimmer than normal and the last few don’t light up at all.
To check them out I tried several lots of alkaline batteries from different brands. With all of them only some of the lights came on.
A friend who is good with electrical things said the problem is that in recent years alkaline batteries have become weaker, because the manufacturers have had to cut out one or more of the chemicals they formerly used (such as lead).
Does anyone know if this is correct? If so, how can I make the lights work normally again???

I can’t find anything conclusive about whether Alkaline capacity has gone down or not. I couldn’t find anyone who’s done any testing online showing that alkalines now have lower capacity than they used two.
My guess is that this is more a problem with your LED lights than the batteries, although I don’t know what happened to them. I thought LED’s were supposed to be pretty stable.
You could try special high-capacity batteries, like Energizer Titaniums or Panasonic Oxyrides, but this probably isn’t the right application for them, as they’re geared towards high drain devices, and actually provide lower amp hours than alkalines in low drain. The failure of the bulbs to light up shouldn’t be because they can’t draw enough amps, because any of these batteries, when new, should provide plenty of juice to run the LED’s.
If there’s a battery problem, my guess would be that your battery voltage isn’t high enough. There’s one clear thing to try in that case: buy lithium batteries and see how they do. Lithium batteries run at higher voltages and last about twice as long as alkalines. For AA’s:

Alkalines: about 2850 mAh for a 20-hour drain. 1.5 V.
NiMH: about 2,000 mAH for a slow drain, but actually much better than alkaline (twice as many Ah) for high drain. 1.25V
Lithium: 4000 mAh for high or low drain, 1.7 V.

So you might give the lithiums a shot.

Good luck.

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