These were helpful in a pinch, no pun intended.

If you had a better option, then use it. I’ve put these things into testers because they’re too darn annoying. If you don’t get a reading, you have no idea if the battery is just dead, or you just screwed up making these fiddly things work.

I’m not a big fan of alkaline batteries in the first place, and the rechargeable ones are great to use in medium and high drain devices that are used frequently, but for anything that’s low drain or sits for a long time without being used, the batteries tend to drain themselves faster than they get used. Even if the device is completely off.

I vastly prefer any form of lithium over most of the intermediate rechargeable technologies.