Couple years back I went to the graduation party of a kid my step daughter was friends. The dad had an entire wall pegboarded out with every possible Ryobi cordless tool. It was honestly impressive. And he had one Makita tool. Made me laugh.
Project Farm on YouTube has great tests and reviews of products like this. Fully recommend his channel if you are in the market to buy tools or tool adjacent products.
That’s because the batteries have become the printer ink of the tool world. They’re f’n expensive.
If you buy into a product system it makes no sense to have different batteries that don’t fit all the tools. If you keep the batteries all the same then you can be charging one or two sets vs having to buy extra sets and charger multiplied by the different tool makers.
I have one of the manufacturers shown in the image, and after I got a kit that had a charger, tool, and extra batteries included I got hooked in because they sell tools without batteries, but I have extra! So I bought same maker. The tools are all pretty good, so not much difference between makers, but that’s one way they hook you.
This is the entire motivation I had to buy what I did when I became a homeowner. I don’t want a random assortment of batteries and chargers strewn around the place, especially when a replacement battery pack can run upwards of $300-500 depending on its capacity.
I chose Dewalt, but mainly because I had a pretty capable little DeWalt 12v cordless drill for a long time and I was very happy with it and the durability it had… I purchased a pack of tools, and switched to the 20v “Max” (or whatever variant is local), which is also compatible with the flexvolt, which is good because we added a few garden tools (string trimmer, hedge trimmer, and later a lawnmower). All of the tools we have use the 20v batteries. As luck would have it, DeWalt also released a snow blower in the last few months, which we promptly purchased, since where we live we get quite a bit of snow, and nobody wants to shovel. The only catch is that it uses the 60v flexvolt batteries; the flexvolt batteries can work at 20v, so those batteries can be used on any other tool, however, since the blower is 60v, only those flexvolt batteries can be used with it. It’s the only tool that requires the higher voltage.
There’s a lot of yellow tools. I don’t fault anyone for using a different brand; this is just what I am using.
The batteries are actually really simple. The best thing you can do to increase efficiency and save money is learn to replace the cells. You can get higher quality lithium cells than the batteries come with if they start to fail for way cheaper than you’d expect. The boards have like 12 circuits, and if you can’t fix them you can buy them for a few bucks.
I’ve done that on older battery packs. It’s a PITA because many packs are sealed, not screwed together, and you have to physically cut them apart to get to the batteries within for replacement. And assemble the batteries, which are often soldered in order. Then you gotta figure out how to reassemble the whole thing in a way that it won’t crack apart again. Doable, but definitely not for everyone.
This is the way and how they get everyone hooked. My husband was -this close- to buying a badly reviewed lawn mower all because he had 3 batteries from the same brand. Two hardware store employees talked him out of it even though it meant my husband walked away with a cheaper brand, bless them.
“Yeah. Cordless’ll do that. You might want to consider the powder-actuated tool. The Hilti DX460MX or the Simpson PTP. These two are my Cadillacs. Everything else on this board is second best, sorry to say. Are you contracting or just doing some work around the house?”
But Ryobi and Milwaukee are both owned and manufactured by the same company TTI, they’re practically the same tools just with a different plastic shell
Owned by same company does not mean same tool. I own a bunch of m12 fuel and some Ryobi too. My Milwaukee stuff kicks the pants off of Ryobi but it is also a lot more expensive.
The AEG sub compact cut off tool, for example, is also sold as an M12 tool, and under the Ryobi name. Most of the AEG sub compact stuff shows up elsewhere in the TTI range, if you know where to look.
My battery drill, for example, had identical specs to a Milwaukee drill.
We have Volkswagen and Skoda at our place and there are a lot of common parts under the skin. The towbar electrics module I added to the Skoda is badged Audi.
I wasn’t talking about skoda/Audi/seat/Volkswagen because those are similar. I was using different examples to prove my point that not “all” things owned by same company is the same shit
Notice in my example they are all VAG brands but make completely different types of vehicles.
Not a dad but heavily into the Makita gang. As a German I should be into Hilti or Metabo but Makita just hits the sweetspot of quality and pricing for me.
Only issue with Makita is s their battery tech hasnt caught up with everyone else. They seem to have forgotten their 18 volt line in favor of their 36 volt.
I landed in DeWalt when their cordless devices became as good as/better than corded tools; I standardized on their battery platform only for them to abandon my battery and roll out a new (incompatible) one. Shortly thereafter my batteries bricked and it seems the business model is to force consumers to buy new tools every so often
FML I hate it that they’re all proprietary and incompatible
I know cords are a bit of a pain, but rotating batteries and keeping them charged is also a bit of a pain, and at least the pain of cords ensures that you always have a tool to use when you need it. Also electrical outlets have been standardized for more than a century now.
Exactly. Cordless drills are super convenient and super cheap. For anything more heavy duty than that, I want something corded (which usually has the added advantage of being both cheaper and available in good condition second-hand).
You can buy adapters for literally any battery to any other battery type. They’re all over Etsy and Amazon. Torque test channel even does a test to see how much performance you lose from them, along with building a monster battery pack that uses all the brands batteries at the same time.
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