New cordless tool battery charger available

[Jeffrey Makiel]

This gizmo claims that it has a 70% chance of reviving an old worn out battery. If you're like me, I have quite a collection of shot batteries that I just can't seem to part with because replacements are so expensive. Perhaps they are too far gone now anyway.

Has anyone tried this charger yet? It also claims to charge in 15 minutes. Or is it just "the emporers new cloths". It's a bit pricey at $125.

http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=18525&ref_id=4669&ref_t=Z&originid=68112153

-Jeff :)

[Eric Haycraft]

I would approach with extreme caution and at least wait until amazon has a couple reviews up. They have a website up www.10ctech.com, but not much info on it. One testimonial and it doesn't really say how well the recovery option works. What I do see them doing that is a novel idea is monitoring battery temperature during the charge. That is important and could help prolong battery life.
However, by restore they may just mean that they put a charge on it when other chargers simply refused it. That 'charge' may only be like 15 percent of the original capacity. When the chemistry of a battery starts to break down, all that can be done is prolonging the inevitable. I am being a bit harsh here, but without any technical info besides "we invented this super magic restorer," I would approach with extreme caution. If they did do something novel, they would probably tell you what they did and why it works better. I also didn't see any independent labs that tested the technology.

When my nicads bit the dust a few months back, I priced two new batteries at 120 bucks for nicads, 320 for 2 lithium ions and a charger..or a new impact driver + 2 lithium ions for 340.. The lithium ions fit all of my old cordless tools, so it seemed like a good excuse to buy an impact driver and get new batteries at the same. I got myself a sweet impact driver and can't say that I would consider buying anything nicad again.

If you do get one, let us know how it works. There are tons of people that want a magic charger, but we need to know if it is just hype or not. They have a crew model that is neat also. It has 4 ports, so you could charge all of you brands/batteries at the same time. Neat space saver idea.

[Mike Henderson]

The local wood store had one of these and invited people to bring their batteries in to try on the charger. I brought two "dead" batteries in and left them plugged in for over a half hour. They were no better than when charged on my regular charger - which means unusable.

Mike

[Dave Falkenstein]

Simply have your dead tool batteries rebuilt. My experience is that rebuilt batteries are better than new ones, and cheaper too. I use this guy:

http://www.mtobattery.com/store/