Great battery life with terrible taste!
Starting with 2023 all Chipolo finders with a coin battery will use Duracell’s coin batteries with a bitter coating that makes the battery taste terrible.
These coin batteries are ringed with a circle-shaped layer of Bitrex, the bitterest substance known to man that reacts with saliva to release its off-putting taste.
Source: duracell.co.uk
It is completely harmless if consumed, but tastes “really, really horrible.” (source: Bitrex).
It even has a Guinness World Record as the bitterest substance in the known universe!
Smaller electronic devices = smaller batteries
Our phones aren’t the only electronic devices that shrunk in the last decade; the same is happening to our TV remote controls, card readers, electronic games, and many more.
At the same time many gadgets that were previously ‘dumb’ are now becoming smart and dependent on battery power, for example, car keys, kitchen and bathroom scales, thermometers, and even toys.
All of these (and many more!) are powered by coin batteries and all of them are also always in reach of curious small children, who find the small, shiny, bite-size batteries especially interesting.
Changing the battery on a Chipolo doesn’t happen by accident.
The Chipolo is designed to keep the battery firmly on the inside, and anyone who’s ever replaced one can tell you it would take a lot of damage to make one fall out of the Chipolo on its own.
While the idea behind the battery swap is simple (insert a tool into the small opening, and pry the Chipolo apart), there are design features in place to make sure you can only get the battery out if you carefully follow the instructions.
But accidents do happen.
Anyone who’s ever put a tracker on their pet can tell you there’s always a way to make it break.
While the other parts of Chipolo are fixed to the casing and cannot be accidentally ingested, the battery is free-standing, since that is the only way it can be replaced when it runs out.
This is why we’re adding an extra precaution in case a child or a pet ever does come across a coin battery outside a Chipolo.
The non-toxic coating on the Duracell battery inside the Chipolo reacts with the saliva to create an incredibly bitter taste that will encourage your child or pet to spit the battery out and will also teach them not to repeat this action again.
Learn more about how Duracell uses Bitrex and what extra precautions you can take with coin batteries yourself here.
