Dr.Al
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- 2,101
- Location
- Gloucestershire, UK
I've currently got a Ryobi cordless drill - just a fairly cheap thing I got from B&Q quite a lot of years ago.
It is a continuous source of frustration. The drill chuck's crap (slips too easily) but that's a fairly minor thing compared to my main bugbear: the battery. I'm on my second battery now and probably should have been on my third or even fourth battery several years ago. It uses NiCd batteries, which might be part of the problem, and after a couple of years they stop retaining their charge. I recovered the first one and got it working again for a while by dumping a battery across the terminals (to blow out any nickel whiskers or whatever they are), but really I just find it frustrating.
I'm a DIY user of a cordless drill and use it extremely infrequently. I often find that when I get the drill out the battery is flat and I have to put it on charge for an hour or two before I can do the job I wanted to start.
That all leads me onto my questions:
1. How do modern Li-Ion or Lithium Polymer battery drills compare when used infrequently? Do they hold the charge better and after 3, 4 or even 5 years do they still hold the charge?
2. Are there any battery drills out there that have a plug-in option? Most of the time that I use the cordless drill I'm not that far away from a mains socket: I'm just using the cordless drill for convenience as it's a lot lighter than my big mains Bosch drill and doesn't need a cord. If I get to it and find the battery's flat, I'd be much happier with digging a cable out, plugging it and using it as a corded drill than having to wait 2 hours for the battery to charge.
It is a continuous source of frustration. The drill chuck's crap (slips too easily) but that's a fairly minor thing compared to my main bugbear: the battery. I'm on my second battery now and probably should have been on my third or even fourth battery several years ago. It uses NiCd batteries, which might be part of the problem, and after a couple of years they stop retaining their charge. I recovered the first one and got it working again for a while by dumping a battery across the terminals (to blow out any nickel whiskers or whatever they are), but really I just find it frustrating.
I'm a DIY user of a cordless drill and use it extremely infrequently. I often find that when I get the drill out the battery is flat and I have to put it on charge for an hour or two before I can do the job I wanted to start.
That all leads me onto my questions:
1. How do modern Li-Ion or Lithium Polymer battery drills compare when used infrequently? Do they hold the charge better and after 3, 4 or even 5 years do they still hold the charge?
2. Are there any battery drills out there that have a plug-in option? Most of the time that I use the cordless drill I'm not that far away from a mains socket: I'm just using the cordless drill for convenience as it's a lot lighter than my big mains Bosch drill and doesn't need a cord. If I get to it and find the battery's flat, I'd be much happier with digging a cable out, plugging it and using it as a corded drill than having to wait 2 hours for the battery to charge.