Thread: Battery Substitution

Good to see someone fighting back against planned obsolescence.

Don't know if this helps, but I recently bought a secondhand Bosch cordless drill. After it arrived, I put the battery in, pulled the trigger, seemed to have plenty of power, so put it away.

Last week I dug it out to see how long it would run. About 2 minutes before it cut out. Spare battery was better, but not much. A bit miffed, I downloaded the manual to get an idea of the specs, charge time, etc. Found a section detailing what to do when the battery is stored for a long time - and noted the symptoms would be similar to what I had, short charge time, short run time. Procedure says to run the battery FLAT, then charge. Rinse and repeat 5 or 6 times. (of course let them cool between steps)

At the end of this, I get about 30 minutes of runtime, and charging takes around 35. A bit down from new, but more than usable. These are NiCds, so similar procedure might apply if yours are too.

For NiCad batteries that sounds like procedure for avoiding NiCad memory effect such as you described. My battery was a Lithium Ion and I suspect given its age that one or more cells were failing under load.

Lithium Ion batteries can also suffer from a problem where they won’t charge if the voltage falls below a certain threshold.