Comment by bombcar
3 days ago
I never buy the batteries - I always look for a tool with the battery, as you can almost always score a free tool (or free battery depending on how you look at it).
3 days ago
I never buy the batteries - I always look for a tool with the battery, as you can almost always score a free tool (or free battery depending on how you look at it).
The 4x 18V/5Ah batteries that came with my lawnmower (which uses them in pairs) are retailing for for $560.
And then not as any sort of special deal, just the standard retail bundle, the lawnmower with four batteries included costs $700. So that's $560 of batteries and $140 of lawnmower.
It's funny how lithium ion cell prices have absolutely cratered everywhere else, but the price of tool batteries just keeps going up.
I wish there was somebody making reputable quality compatible tool batteries instead of mystery brand counterfeit trash.
You get what you pay for.
Tool batteries as a general rule don't do anything fancy internally, so they are easily substituted. I suspect it's mostly a matter of the main buyers being tradies/workers who use them to make money and thus don't care that much about the expense of the batteries - they probably aren't replaced that often.
Would be nice if there was a 3rd-party seller known to use quality cells though, rather than unknown off brands.
Curiously, the mystery brand Bosch-compatible batteries on I bought on eBay -- literally cheapest seller -- seem to work very well even after years.
With brandless batteries, it's luck-of-the-draw, but overall, as much as I do wish there were some way to know what you're getting, I've had good luck more often than not.
What's also been nice is the rise of adapters. My Bosch blue batteries now fit many places they didn't used to.
I wish these manufacturers wouldn't go brandless, because I've found some cheap but great laptop chargers in the past that I would buy a ton of if I knew who made them, but the brandless nature means that once that seller is done or out of stock, it's back to crapshoot.
Some of these brandless Chinese makes are really solid, high quality products, but you can't easily tell which ones because they're visually indistinguishable from the bad ones.
At this point I suspect the only way we're getting compatible tool batteries is if the E.U. comes out with regulation.
No company actually wants to make it easier for people to buy other tool brands.
Before the EU can do that, someone will have to define a standard.
1 reply →
> It's funny how lithium ion cell prices have absolutely cratered everywhere else, but the price of tool batteries just keeps going up.
Seems like the tool batteries might be the new ink cartridges.
Behold
https://ceenr.com/ !
ceenr.com batteries appear to be ok.
Seems like this is the kind of thing that could be the basis of a community?
It feels like there is a segment the tool co's are selling toward, that leaves another segment underserved.
Eip if this is something you want to hobby-horse on.
Drug dealers give out feelers to get customers started.