# Replacing Batteries



## RWolff (Jan 27, 2013)

jagans said:


> Hi Guys, I have two 14.4 Volt Bosch Drills. The drills are fine but the batteries are coming to the end of their useful life. The problem, which Im sure all of you have run into is the cost of replacement batteries. They have basically made it so that good cordless drills will be thrown into the landfill.
> 
> A 14.4 Volt Bosch battery goes for about 55 dollars.
> 
> ...


Ive never heard of rebuilding these, they are made to be disposable. If you figure buying cells and your time soldering and messing with it, you'll have more into that than just buying a new $55 battery unless you consider your time worthless or $2 an hour.

If you buy the new tool with a battery for $99 the new tool may or may not be as good as the one you have, parts inside may have been replaced with cheaper ones or maybe not, if not then you have a spare for parts or to put into use if your current one dies, breaks, falls off the roof onto concrete or the kid dunks it in the pool.

It's the same story with inkjet printers, you buy a $59 printer with inks and then discover it will cost $50 to replace the inks, in which case most will just throw the whole thing in the trash and buy a new one with the inks.


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## jagans (Oct 21, 2012)

RWolff said:


> Ive never heard of rebuilding these, they are made to be disposable. If you figure buying cells and your time soldering and messing with it, you'll have more into that than just buying a new $55 battery unless you consider your time worthless or $2 an hour.
> 
> If you buy the new tool with a battery for $99 the new tool may or may not be as good as the one you have, parts inside may have been replaced with cheaper ones or maybe not, if not then you have a spare for parts or to put into use if your current one dies, breaks, falls off the roof onto concrete or the kid dunks it in the pool.
> 
> It's the same story with inkjet printers, you buy a $59 printer with inks and then discover it will cost $50 to replace the inks, in which case most will just throw the whole thing in the trash and buy a new one with the inks.


Yeah I know Wolfman. I have always had a problem with letting things go, and its getting worse. What pisses me off is all the hoopla about going green, when no manufacturer even considers it. I think there may be a Chinese conspiracy to watch us bury ourselves in our offshore built crap, while they laugh their heads off.

As far as inkjet printers go, you are right on the money. 35 bucks for one ounce of ink. I refill mine, but there is and has been a concerted effort by all manufacturers of these things to make it impossible to do.

I finally bought a dell laser printer because I was sick of having colored hands. It has been bullet proof, and refilling the carts is easy.

I own two plotters made by HP and they stopped even supporting my 36 inch color plotter with drivers about 3 years after it was introduced. I found it on ebay and refurbished it, found a driver that works, and it prints beautifully, but the inks are very expensive, which reminds me I better go print a demo print so the heads dont dry up. :thumbup:

Thanks for the wake up call.


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## RWolff (Jan 27, 2013)

jagans said:


> Yeah I know Wolfman. I have always had a problem with letting things go, and its getting worse. What pisses me off is all the hoopla about going green, when no manufacturer even considers it. I think there may be a Chinese conspiracy to watch us bury ourselves in our offshore built crap, while they laugh their heads off.



We get used to and comfortable with a certain tool or appliance that's a given, what annoys me is you go to buy another one like it and learn it's been discontinued, this is happening more and more and on a more rapid cycle.
All the design time, dies, production startup etc etc being changed every time they change the style or model, and then new problems crop up because they change the design constantly.

If anything it's a conspiracy to keep people buying new everything on a 1-5 year cycle.
The green thing is a scam, if people really, _really_ want to go "green" and save the planet, turning down the termostat 2 degrees at night, changing out your little 60 watt bulb for a CFL and recycling your plastic garbage bags aint gonna cut it and is all but worthless.
Going green means deciding to have ONE child instead of 2 or 3, or deciding to adopt one of the 250,000 in foster care instead of adding to the problem.



> As far as inkjet printers go, you are right on the money. 35 bucks for one ounce of ink. I refill mine, but there is and has been a concerted effort by all manufacturers of these things to make it impossible to do.
> 
> I finally bought a dell laser printer because I was sick of having colored hands. It has been bullet proof, and refilling the carts is easy.


I felt raped every time I re-inked and looking at those tiny bottles of watered down stuff that looks like food coloring, and the colors don't last they fade fast.
Like you, I went to a B&W laser printer- Samsung ML 2540, still on the original generous toner cartridge, works perfectly.


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## jagans (Oct 21, 2012)

RWolff said:


> We get used to and comfortable with a certain tool or appliance that's a given, what annoys me is you go to buy another one like it and learn it's been discontinued, this is happening more and more and on a more rapid cycle.
> All the design time, dies, production startup etc etc being changed every time they change the style or model, and then new problems crop up because they change the design constantly.
> 
> If anything it's a conspiracy to keep people buying new everything on a 1-5 year cycle.
> ...


Yeah, laser is the way to go. I went color because I needed that option at the time for photos, but now I am mostly paperless, as everything goes out of here email as a pdf. The paper waste in this country is remarkable in itself.

As far as green goes, we were much greener years ago. The only time today's youth goes green is when the green starts leaving their wallets to pay the energy bill. We got a cuff behind the ear for leaving the lights on.

I went all CFL immediately after I looked at one of those side by side with an incandescent through my IR camera. You cannot believe the difference in heat output, and therefore power consumption, till you see it on in IR. WOW


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## RWolff (Jan 27, 2013)

jagans said:


> Yeah, laser is the way to go. I went color because I needed that option at the time for photos, but now I am mostly paperless, as everything goes out of here email as a pdf. The paper waste in this country is remarkable in itself.


I went to B&W because I rarely need color for what I print anyway, scale drawings, documents and shipping labels.
Just think of the amount of paper wasted on printed newspapers!



> I went all CFL immediately after I looked at one of those side by side with an incandescent through my IR camera. You cannot believe the difference in heat output, and therefore power consumption, till you see it on in IR. WOW


I tend to disagree on the lights there, the heat is not wasted during the cooler months, every BTU in the room is one less the furnace has to burn to provide heat. In the summer the sun sets so late anyway you don't need lights usually at 4 pm as you do in December.
Lights are a miniscule amount of the whole electric bill,you can run a 100 watt bulb for TEN hours for one kilowatt, which here is 7-1/2 cents.
The real power suckers are the electric furnace, water heater, heat pump, A/C, dishwasher, microwave, range, washer/dryer, well pump etc etc.


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## ddawg16 (Aug 15, 2011)

I've rebuilt the battery packs for my Ryobi.

Almost all of those battery packs use c size NiCd's strapped in series. In most cases it's just one or two batteries that have gone bad. Replace those and your good until the next one goes.

I have one pack that I use as a donor for batteries....2 of them were bad but the others were ok.

The only 'issue' is that the batteries are typically welded together....sometimes end to end or with metal straps. Ryobi uses straps.

I cut out the old battery as close to the battery as possible. On the donor battery I left more of the strap...then I just solder the two straps together.

New life to the battery.

You can go to places like Allied Electronics to get new batteries with the strap.


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## jproffer (Mar 12, 2005)

OT, but the ink that comes with printers is not NEARLY a full cartridge. 

I bought an Epson 3-in-1. Got home, set it up...it required me to print a test page, which in and of itself is BS, but none-the-less......after the test page was printed, I tried to print something I actually needed to print... "One or more of your ink cartridges are low, please replace them and try again".......there was no option to "take my chances and see if it would print"...nothing. F*** Epson :furious:


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## DannyT (Mar 23, 2011)

you can buy the cells for 3-4 dollars each. just take one of the batteries apart and get the number off of the cell. you can test each cell and only replace the bad ones but i would replace all of them since you have the battery apart anyway. my son used to rebuild them all the time and was much cheaper than buying new ones.


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## ddawg16 (Aug 15, 2011)

jproffer said:


> OT, but the ink that comes with printers is not NEARLY a full cartridge.
> 
> I bought an Epson 3-in-1. Got home, set it up...it required me to print a test page, which in and of itself is BS, but none-the-less......after the test page was printed, I tried to print something I actually needed to print "One or more of your ink cartridges are low, please replace them and try again".......there was no option to "take my chances and see if it would print"...nothing. F*** Epson :furious:


Care to guess why I will never own an Epson printer ever again?


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## jproffer (Mar 12, 2005)

ddawg16 said:


> Care to guess why I will never own an Epson printer ever again?


I have a really good idea why :thumbsup:


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## ratherbefishing (Jan 13, 2011)

If you have a Batteries Plus in your area, they can rebuild the batteries, or possibly sell you the parts. I've also had good luck with batteries from Battery Depot.
http://batterydepot.com/battery/PT-0380/BOSCH/POWERTOOL-BATTERIES/BAT040


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## RWolff (Jan 27, 2013)

jproffer said:


> I have a really good idea why :thumbsup:


That makes six of us then:thumbsup:


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## wkearney99 (Apr 8, 2009)

Most of those packs just have standard-sized nicad cells in there. You can replace them. But you'd need to have a way to spot-weld the straps used to interconnect them. 

You generally can't just solder them together as there's not typically enough room and the heat from the iron wrecks the cell. It's possible to build your own welder for this sort of thing. But that's a bit of overkill. 

I'd definitely shop around to find someone that can rebuild yours, or at least swap them out as cores.


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## RWolff (Jan 27, 2013)

> You generally can't just solder them together as there's not typically enough room and the heat from the iron wrecks


Enough already! buy the new battery and be done with it and go have a BBQ or something


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## wkearney99 (Apr 8, 2009)

What, the guy's interested in finding an effective way to make use of his _real world_ stuff. What's the problem with helping him do that?


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## jomama45 (Nov 13, 2008)

Ask anyone who's ever raced RC car, you can indeed solder the cells together, it's actually the industry standard.........


If you don't want to mess with that, Batteries Plus can rebuild your battery with better cells for less money than new or you can find plenty of cheaper options for sale on the web. I've tried both of these options, and was happy with batteries from each........


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## Windows on Wash (Aug 30, 2011)

Didn't know that Batteries plus did that. Good find.

Heck, you can get the replacement batteries for a Hybrid now for $0.25 on the dollar.

Have Batteries Plus do it James and let me know how it turns out.


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## wkearney99 (Apr 8, 2009)

jomama45 said:


> Ask anyone who's ever raced RC car, you can indeed solder the cells together, it's actually the industry standard.........


He did ask someone that has, I have built and raced RC cars. Tons of fun.

I've borrowed a friend's homemade spot-welder to make tight and break-proof connections between cells for 7 cell packs. Which I did after roasting at least one nicad cell AND dealing with cracks from soldered joints. All that banging around means you're much better off with a welded connection.

Then there's how many of those battery packs are constructed inside. There's often just not enough room for anything else.


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## ddawg16 (Aug 15, 2011)

You have to make sure you have enough overlap of the tab and use a hot enough iron. The most common mistake guys make soldering anything is to use the wrong size iron for the job. 

When your doing those tabs, you want a BIG iron....quick heat so you don't damage the batteries....

I've been repairing packs for some 30 odd years....have yet to damage a battery.


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## ToolSeeker (Sep 19, 2012)

There are several websites that sell new and rebuilt batteries pretty reasonable for almost all cordless tools.


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## ratherbefishin' (Jun 16, 2007)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/15-NiCd-SubC-2200mAh-Batteries-For-PowerTools-With-Tabs-/330401958745?

By far the best deal I've ever found on brand name sub-Cs.


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## SPS-1 (Oct 21, 2008)

jagans said:


> The problem, which Im sure all of you have run into is the cost of replacement batteries.


You got that right. I really liked my 19.2V Sears cordless tools. Batteries eventually died. Replacement batteries were very expensive, but one day found on sale a Sears drill+worklight +batteries+charger kit that was less than two replacement batteries. Bought the kit. (even though I already have the drill and a different spotlight) But unfortunately, all batteries are not created equal. Sears makes batteries in several different Amp-hr capacities. Capacity is not marked on the battery or the package. The new batteries I got in the kit are totally useless --- Arghh!!!!

Now I have to decide if I should spring for a set of the 19.2V Lithium Ion batteries and a new charger, or upgrade to a better set of cordless tools.


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## Larryh86GT (Feb 2, 2013)

Just buy new batteries. :thumbsup:


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## jagans (Oct 21, 2012)

SPS-1 said:


> You got that right. I really liked my 19.2V Sears cordless tools. Batteries eventually died. Replacement batteries were very expensive, but one day found on sale a Sears drill+worklight +batteries+charger kit that was less than two replacement batteries. Bought the kit. (even though I already have the drill and a different spotlight) But unfortunately, all batteries are not created equal. Sears makes batteries in several different Amp-hr capacities. Capacity is not marked on the battery or the package. The new batteries I got in the kit are totally useless --- Arghh!!!!
> 
> Now I have to decide if I should spring for a set of the 19.2V Lithium Ion batteries and a new charger, or upgrade to a better set of cordless tools.


I have been buying recon tools from Bosch CPO for a long time and found them to be very good. I just purchased an 18 volt drill, two high AH NIMH batteries, charger and case for $119. I really like Bosch tools and most of what I own are Bosch, except for some Makita stuff. Two 2.5 AH Batteries would cost about $108 or so so again, "they" have made it cheaper to throw your old perfectly good tools into the landfill. So much for "Green" I have priced the rebuild kits and it is my opinion that the price of those is simply not competitive.


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