Need an AAAA battery in a hurry? There may be six of them inside a PP3!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of days ago, I was having issues with the Surface Pen that I use with my Surface Pro 3. Microsoft’s Troubleshooting Surface Pen page suggested I needed to replace the AAAA battery and, sure enough, a quick test on a battery tester confirmed that my battery was indeed flat.

I went to Amazon and bought a pack of 4 AAAA batteries and was pretty pleased to find I could get near-instant gratification, with the batteries delivered around 4 hours later!

Then, Gary Quigley (@quiggles) tweeted me to say that a Duracell 9V (PP3) battery has 6 AAAAs inside:

I had to test this out so, yesterday, I disassembled an old battery that was due to be recycled and, sure enough, there were 6 AAAA-sized cells!  In the image below you can see the disassembled PP3 on the right, with the old Duracell AAAA and the new Amazon Basics AAAA cells to the left:

AAAA batteries and similar cells inside a disassembled PP3 battery

Wikipedia suggests that not all PP3 batteries are constructed in this way, so “your mileage may vary” but it might be useful when I use up my current stock of AAAAs!

?? Warning: disassembling batteries is probably not the smartest thing to do. I’m not responsible if you hurt yourself or others as a result of any action you take after reading this blog post.