I suppose you could say that two batteries in parallel are as good as
whatever battery's the oldest / weakest. There's no point in doing this
unless the batteries are identical (age as well as characteristics) and
then all you're really doing is making one big battery -- that is,
without some kind of isolation circuit you're not getting redundancy.
(You're actually increasing the chances of failure because you're
introducing extra places where things can go wrong.)
So Bill Swingle's right.......don't waste your time, just use one
relatively new, good quality battery. The world won't end if you use two
smaller ones but you won't gain anything except a false sense of security.
I wouldn't obsess over everything being brand new, though. Electronics
failure rates are usually described as a 'bathtub' curve -- new stuff
has a higher probability of failing for a short time, then everything's
stable for quite a long time and finally things start to fail as they
get to the end of their life. This curve is messed up these days because
modern electronics is so well made that infant mortality is rare for
consumer products but the principle is still valid. So I'd take a
battery that's been used successfully over a couple of months over a new
one any time.
(I'd be wary of switches, though -- the ones that you buy are pretty
reliable (they actually have two sets of contacts) but they're still
quite cheaply made. Its easy to buy good quality switches.)
Martin Usher
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