We purchased a Bluefang 5 in 1 collar a little ove...

We purchased a Bluefang 5 in 1 collar a little over a year ago and it has been very disappointing. Although the collar did work, it and the other collars they sell are designed to only take their batteries to ensure you continue to spend money with them. Since we bought the collar we have spent $113.40 on batteries and it would have been even more if we hadn't been buying them in bulk 12 packs and when they were on sale. On top of that they even sent us an additional 12 pack for free due to the short battery life. It is great they did that but I think it's unreasonable for a collar like this to go through over 30 batteries in just over a year.

The 5 in 1 collar has batteries that are encased in an additional plastic shell which is thrown out with the batteries every time you change them which is poor design and very wasteful. They claim their battery pack design is to make both 3V and 6V power available to the processor and shock transformer for efficiency and longer battery life (ya right). I can think of much better designs that would use a re-usable battery holder that you could put your own actual high quality battery cells into. Their battery cases have very small and delicate contacts that you sometimes need to bend to make them make proper contact with the collar circuit board.

The batteries are also over-priced considering they are not high quality name brand batteries like Energizer or Duracell. They claim that the batteries are made by Panasonic but I opened up one of the dead battery cases and it just said "made in China" on the batteries. Since we bought it the collar has been going through batteries more and more quickly and has gotten to the point that we are just not going to keep buying batteries for it. The speaker for beeping and clicking also stopped working after just under a year so that functionality is now gone. Considering how much these collars cost it is very disappointing that they aren't more robust, are so poorly designed, and designed to make you spend money on their over-priced batteries.