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There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

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Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#81

Post by bombcar »

tpmx wrote: post #51
bombcar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Festool can’t even use the same battery across their tools (and even at the same voltage!) so there’s no way they could handle a standardized battery heh

I wonder what kind of financial motive german manufacturers of cordless battery powered tools like Festool, Bosch, Metabo, Stihl, Einhell etc could have against a standardized battery format for cordless devices... Oh, and you know that like just like with Apple their first cry will be "but safety!" when/if they are forced to standardize/open up.

A huge swath of tool brands are owned by Stanley Black and Decker (such as dewalt and craftsman and so on) and they can’t even match batteries across their own brands.

A big part of the problem is ANY battery change even to a universal standard is a change away from your current customer base, which will annoy them.

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#82

Post by rasz »

Its more than brand lock in, its market segmentation.

POWER TOOL MANUFACTURERS AND WHO REALLY OWNS THEM https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-...

TTI owns Milwaukee, Ridgid, Ryobi. Cant swap batteries between them despite all coming from same factory.

Stanleyblackanddecker is Craftsman, Stanley, Proto, Irwin, MAC, Bostitch, DeWalt, the list goes on and on. Its pure comedy. There are some rare cases where they share same design in different regions https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/104pndo/yes_theyre_1... but other than that they pull pranks like same injection molding with same pin shape but switched polarity!

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#83

Post by jfengel »

I was tickled the other day to discover that Makita also makes a coffee maker that uses their batteries. It's a nifty gimmick to get you to use Makita-branded products on the job site.

https://www.makitatools.com/products/details/DCM501Z

(They also offer a kettle and a cooler, and other things that are useful on a job site but not conventionally "tools".)

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#84

Post by exabrial »

Vendor lockin is why. These things are expensive, but they're not a pure profit center as one thinks....

Most tool batteries just wrap high quality LG Chem 18650s. I don't know the wholesale price, but since they're roughly $4-$5 at retail, lets say 8x @ $3 wholesale. Then you have electronics bom/assembly (generous $10) and casing/asembly ($2) and labor ($1) for a total of $37. Following the "Double your cost and charge that rule" = $74

I made my estimate before looking up the cost of batteries, but Ryobi (Owned by TTI, same people that make Milwaukee hilariously) falls around that price point as do others. So the prices, while seemingly ginormous, aren't as absurd as one thinks. 18650 LiOn prices are insane.

DeWalt (Owned by Stanley Black & Decker) is now creating tool batteries that use flat cells (called "Pouch Batteries"), which honestly, makes _a lot_ more sense. Square tool batteries = square batteries = more mAh per unit volume. No idea why don't use these in BE-EVs.

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#85

Post by Tagbert »

maxerickson wrote: post #80
rektide wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love for there to be some competition. Absolutely. This submission is about cordless power tools batteries, so that somewhat affects the scope. In general, cords can be super dangerous & limiting for power tools, so battery based has naturally really taken the heck over, for all kinds of good reasons. Even still, I think the questioning is fine & good, could apply to this segment. Bluetooth is a bit hard because…

Oh, the Bluetooth thing was just an aside about not caring about having communications on the same cable as power for higher power devices, I don't think it's very relevant to power tools. My point was more about not having the higher power delivery implementation tied to a complicated, relatively expensive, high speed data bus. The reason stuff doesn't do any reporting is that people mostly don't care and it would a…

Bluetooth is much more complicated than the basic power negotiation on USB-PD.

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#86

Post by glasss »

StueyGuyd wrote: post #78
glasss wrote: post #26

First time seeing this blog and it seems like they're trying too hard to give the benefit of doubt here. The list of concerns / drawbacks, particularly the reliability of performance concern, may be valid, but consumers deal with these already with every other battery powered device. A cheap USB charger or cable can dramatically effect your charging speed, a cheap AA battery may reduce your runtime, etc. It feels lik…

It's not that I wanted to give brands the benefit of the doubt, but that I believe there are other hurdles and significant obstacles independent of corporate profit considerations. Many consumers are familiar with the concept of Ah (amp-hours) as akin to a car's gas tank, where the more amp-hours a battery has, the longer it can power a device. If you buy a video camera, the brand's 4Ah battery should allow for doubl…

I appreciate the response. I might just not be the target of your blog, in your given example:

>You're at the home center and see three power tool batteries on the shelf - all are 18V and rated at 3Ah, but they're different physical sizes. Which is better?

>With a bit of research on your phone,

Personally, myself nor anyone I know who uses power tools more than just buying a 12v drill once, would do this research on our phone in the aisle of Home Depot. If I see three batteries all rated the same, it would be a price decision or a form factor one ("bigger must be better"). That could be where my disconnect is - I've never once thought about what kind of internal battery cells are being used.

>With many more options available, I'm sure many users will pair cheaper brand name batteries with pro-level tools and expect everything to work well together.

This happens now across the consumer and business space. I have clients at work who buy a cheaper usb-c dock for their laptops, because why is the Dell official one $250? Some users might run into issues with it while others in their company don't. Some blame the dock, some blame their old laptop, some curse that their company didn't buy them Apple devices. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, sometimes it is the dock but sometimes it isn't. Dell doesn't care - they made $100B last year and they'll just tell you to buy the official Dell dock even if it is your old computer causing the issues.

But I, and everyone I know, would hate it if no one made those cheaper usb-c docks and just limited our choices to the $250 options.

The math behind the market of the batteries also doesn't interest anyone I know. We don't care how / why Milwaukee or Makita runs deals, we're just mad that we're spending so much. More options, and cheaper options, have never been a bad thing in a market.

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#87

Post by Arrath »

StrangeATractor wrote: post #63
bombcar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite as cut and dried as that, but it's getting closer as the brands expand. My contractor friend would refer to various tools as the "Brand" because he had one cordless tool from that brand because they had the one he needed. "Go grab the Makita", that kind of thing. From my experience it's the prosumer market that gets really rabid about their tool color. Do NOT cross the Red Army!

There are exceptions depending on what you're doing, but generally speaking 95% of your cordless tools will be one brand.

And it'll often be for the advantage of a single warranty/service/repair contract as much as a unified battery logistics chain.

When you have crews burning out a half dozen assorted hammer drills, recirc saws, electric rivet busters, etc. a week then the service side of the contract really comes in to play.

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#88

Post by rhinoceraptor »

silisili wrote: post #3

Mentioned in the comments, I looked into CAS a couple years back. Sounds great in theory, but it seems the vast majority of partners using it are for one off, specialty tools... https://www.cordless-alliance-system.com/

It's ironic, there's also a competing "standard" where Bosch licenses their batteries to smaller tool brands: https://www.ampshare.com/gb/en/

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#89

Post by datpiff »

bombcar wrote: post #57
StrangeATractor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a secret in construction, you buy one brand of cordless tools and stick with it. DeWalt sells tools so cheap you wonder if they're a loss leader. A single battery (one of the big 60V, 12Ah ones you use for circular saws and angle grinders) is $285 on Amazon. The biggest cordless circular is $178, the biggest grinder is $163. You'll want at least two of those batteries per day if you're doing any serious wo…

It's not quite as cut and dried as that, but it's getting closer as the brands expand. My contractor friend would refer to various tools as the "Brand" because he had one cordless tool from that brand because they had the one he needed. "Go grab the Makita", that kind of thing. From my experience it's the prosumer market that gets really rabid about their tool color. Do NOT cross the Red Army!

> From my experience it's the prosumer market that gets really rabid about their tool color. Do NOT cross the Red Army!

Turn-over is much lower. A professional may buy a whole line of tools from a single brand but with the expectation that they may replace them all in several years. This allows some level of comparison and movement between brands as quality varies over time.

The part-timer/prosumer is locked in for a decade or more and ends up tying the tool brand to their identity...

Re: There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?

#90

Post by JohnFen »

rektide wrote: post #66
glasss wrote: post #26

First time seeing this blog and it seems like they're trying too hard to give the benefit of doubt here. The list of concerns / drawbacks, particularly the reliability of performance concern, may be valid, but consumers deal with these already with every other battery powered device. A cheap USB charger or cable can dramatically effect your charging speed, a cheap AA battery may reduce your runtime, etc. It feels lik…

The world after usb-pd looks so different. Everything used to be expensive bulky & proprietary. It turns out usb-pd works pretty damned well. It'll be a while before anything meaningful happens for this market though. 100w would power a huge range of tools but not all. 240w would be great, work for a huge range of tools with ton of overhead. But the lack probably has a much lower voltage that would need to be up-conv…

The USB connector is the problem here. For a tool like these, I'd certainly want one that's more rugged than USB-C. Those things are fragile.
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