Reviewed by Marcus Knapman, BSc (Hons) Computing ·
Researched from 100+ Amazon customer reviews
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There's a particular kind of household despair that comes from pressing a remote control and getting nothing. You open the drawer of doom, rummage past the takeaway menus and the dead lightbulbs, and discover the last AA battery you own is either flat, furry or missing entirely. If that sounds familiar, you probably need a bulk buy, and the Amazon Basics 36-Pack AA Alkaline High-Performance Batteries is about as straightforward a way of fixing it as I can think of.
At £6.21 for 36 cells, you're paying roughly 17p a battery. For context, a four-pack from the corner shop can cost nearly as much as this whole box. That price alone makes it worth a proper look, though cheap batteries have a long history of being cheap for a reason.
So I've gone through the spec sheet, read what buyers say about these cells, and weighed up where they make sense and where they don't. My bottom line, up front: for low-drain household gadgets, this is a very sensible purchase. For anything that chews through batteries at speed, there are better ways to spend your money, and Amazon Basics itself points you towards them. I'll explain exactly where the line sits.
The most interesting thing about buying 36 AAs at once isn't the saving, it's the change in attitude. When batteries are precious, you wait until a device is properly dead before replacing them, and you swear at the TV remote in the meantime. When you've got three dozen in a cupboard, you just swap them and move on. That small shift in convenience is worth more than the pennies saved.
At £6.21, this is firmly at the budget end of the category. I can't give you an Amazon star rating for this specific listing because none is available in the data I'm working from, so I won't pretend otherwise. What I can say is that the price and the claimed specification are the two things you're really buying here, so let's look at both.
Amazon Basics states these have a 10-year leak-free shelf life, and for a bulk pack that's the claim that matters most. Nobody buys 36 batteries to use them all next week. They get tucked into a drawer, a toolbox or a camping box and forgotten about. A long shelf life means the last ones in the pack should still be usable years from now, rather than slowly sagging in the dark.
The leak-free part deserves a mention too. Anyone who has opened a torch to find a crusty white mess knows how unpleasant a leaking cell is, and how it can write off the device it's sitting in. A ten-year promise suggests the manufacturer is confident about how these are built. I'd still treat any shelf-life figure as a best case, as storage conditions matter. Keep them somewhere cool and dry, not on a sunny windowsill or in a damp garage, and you give them the best chance of living up to it.
The listing names game controllers, remote controls, flashlights and clocks, and that's a fair summary of the sweet spot. These are alkaline cells, and alkaline chemistry is at its best in low-drain, long-haul devices. A wall clock sipping power for a year, a TV remote, a wireless keyboard, a smoke alarm backup, a kids' toy: all perfectly suited to a 1.5 volt alkaline.
Compatibility is simple. If it takes AA batteries, it takes these. There's no clever proprietary shape or special connector to worry about, which is the whole point of a standard size.
The packaging is described as easy to open, which sounds trivial until you've wrestled a rigid plastic clamshell with scissors and a sense of grievance. It's a minor win, but I'll take it.
Here's the catch, and Amazon Basics is upfront about it. These are single-use. They are not rechargeable, so when they're flat, they go in the recycling bin at your local collection point, not back on the charger. If you've got something that gets through batteries every few days, like a hungry games controller used daily, you'll churn through these faster than you'd like, and rechargeable cells will win out on cost within a few months.
The listing also tells you plainly that for frequent, professional or industrial use you should consider the Amazon Basics Industrial range instead. I appreciate the candour, but read it as a hint. These are called High-Performance, yet the manufacturer's own advice is that heavy-duty jobs call for a different product. I'd take that at face value. This is an everyday battery for everyday life.
One more practical niggle: 36 is a lot. If you only own a couple of AA devices, you'll be sitting on a stockpile for years. That's fine given the shelf life, but it's cash tied up in a drawer, even if it's only six quid.
The smart move is to split the box. Keep a handful in the kitchen drawer for the clock and remotes, stash a few in the car for torches, and put a sealed set in your emergency kit alongside the candles for the next power cut. Because the shelf life is so long, they won't mind being forgotten, which is exactly what emergency batteries need to survive.
For the price, the maths is hard to argue with. Even if the cells aren't the longest-lasting alkalines ever made, you're getting 36 of them for the cost of a sandwich and a coffee. Buying a branded four-pack from a high street shop will cost you far more per cell, and for a TV remote you'll never notice the difference.
The Amazon Basics 36-Pack AA Alkaline High-Performance Batteries won't win any awards for excitement. Batteries never do. But they do the dull job of powering your small gadgets for very little money, and they do it without fuss, which is all I ask of a battery.
For TV remotes, clocks, torches and other low-drain gadgets, the Amazon Basics 36-Pack AA Alkaline Batteries are a sensible, cheap way to stock the house for years. If you've got power-hungry devices you use every day, buy rechargeables or the industrial range instead.
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