If you take care of your power tools, they’ll take care of your DIY job. And what better way to care for your impressive tools than to care for their battery? Read on to discover the best practices for prolonging your power tools’ battery life.
Discharge the battery regularly
This is another way of saying that you should use the tool often. Just as it’s important to keep the battery charged, it’s important to keep those electrons inside the batteries moving. If you don’t use power tools all that much, consider getting a wired version instead. It will also save you some money.
Don’t deep discharge the battery
We’ve all done that at least once – running the battery down until it’s completely drained. This is not a good practice for any kind of battery. Some people claim that NiCD and NiMh batteries have what is known as “memory effect” aka “lazy battery effect”. This effect allegedly causes nickel-cadmium batteries to eventually lose their maximum capacity if they you recharge them repeatedly after just being discharged partially.
This drives many people to run their battery’s “full course” i.e. down to 1%-2% before recharging. However, even in such batteries, you just need to completely discharge the battery once every 20 to 30 days to counter the “memory effect”. And if your power tool has a Lithium-ion battery, you never even have to do that as they don’t suffer from the lazy battery affect. In fact, partial charges are good for Lithium-ion batteries. The best practice is to recharge the battery when it falls below 20%.
Drop the habit of recharging after a little use
You know how some people have that itch to get to a gas station as soon as the needle drops a little? Same thing happens to many power tool users. They can’t bear the sight of their tool (or any device really) falling below 70%. So they often recharge only after a little use. You should avoid this because it hurts battery life.
Charge fully
For most types of batteries, you should keep them fully charged for maximum battery life. Perhaps the only exception to this rule is the lithium-ion battery, where partial charges and dis-charges are preferable. Even in that case there’s no real harm in fully charging it once in a while.
Protect the battery
How? Keep it cool. Keep it dry. Don’t drop it. Don’t give it hard bumps. And of course, keep out of the reach of children who will probably violate all of these protection rules!
Adjust your tool’s power settings
Running your power tool at maximum power and speed might feel good. However, you may be wasting battery energy if the job can be done on lower power. So check your tool’s power settings, you’ll be able to change the speed and power. The tool will run longer on every charge this way.
Don’t overcharge
A lot of modern power tools have chargers that won’t overcharge your battery. Some are even specially designed for NiCd and NiMh batteries to be left on them to keep them charged. However, unless your power tool’s user manual tells you otherwise, don’t leave your batteries on a charger once they’re charged. Overcharging damages the battery and reduces its life.
Sometimes your DIY project requires hard use of your power tools, making it difficult to follow some of the above power tools battery advice. Of course, you can always find a professional team to handle the job. If not, just try your best to follow the above advice and extend your power tools’ battery life.