How to Fix a Drill Battery That Won't Charge
Drills are one of the most popular and commonly used tools for drilling. There are the best and most suited tools for boring holes. There are also used for driving screws. You have the alternative of choosing between a drill drive and an impact drive that is both available and affordable.
Recent technology has made it possible for us to have cordless drills that are powered by batteries. Some of these batteries develop faults. This usually prompts the need for how to fix a drill battery that won't charge.
Drills come in two broad categories. We have the manual drills and power drills. The manual drills are hand-driven, and require human strength for its operation. The speed measured in rotation per minute (RPM) for this drill type is slow.
As a result of this, the use of manual or hand-driven drills are limited. More so, they are not portable and are not accurate.
On the other hand, we have the power-driven drill. A power-driven drill is a power tool. In the family of power drills, we also have the hammer drills or impact drills. These are drills which are used for drilling through very hard surfaces. Hammer drills belong to the SDS drills category.
These types of drills pack punches in addition to their high rotation speeds.
Types of Power Drills
All power drills are classified into brush or brushless motor drills.
The Brush Drills
Drills are equipped with electric motors. These motors convert the electrical power provided, to mechanical energy for turning the shaft, which in turn rotates the chuck. Rotation is then transmitted to the drill bit.
Some electric motors used in drills convert electrical power by means of an assembly of carbon brushes and commutators. This is the earliest technology available for this purpose back in the day.
The carbon brushes used in such drill motors were prone to wear. When such brushes wear out, they require replacement. This frequent need to replace the carbon brushes increase the maintenance cost of brush drills.
The major concerns associated with brush motor drills, are the frequent sparks and friction it introduces into the system. The sparks and the friction in the system causes overheating in the drill. Most importantly, this heat produced and friction experienced result in energy losses in the system.
Overall, brush motor drills expend useful energy as heat, resulting in high inefficiency in the energy conversion process.
These inefficiencies in the system are clearly why brush drills are becoming less common, even while there are relatively cheaper.
Brushless Drills
The brushless technology as introduced by the duo, grew and were used in systems where little or no brush wear could be tolerated. Such systems include the development of high torque and high response drives. There were also used in tapes and disc drives in the early computers.
However, the conventional brushless motors as we know it now, was made possible by the invention of powerful permanent magnets and high voltage transistors in the 19th century.
In brushless motors, we have an electromagnetic field effect which causes the shaft of the motor to spin. This is totally different from the spring, brush and commutator arrangement in the brush drill motor.
All you see in a brushless drill motor is a laminated steel cylinder. The internal circuit is designed to create a revolving magnetic field that causes the shaft to spin.
The merits of brushless drill motor is that the process of energy conversion is seamless and friction free. More so, they are no incidents of sparks and overheating within the system. This in effect means that energy losses in the system is greatly minimized.
If you make this comparison using a cord drill, it may not be quite clear how effective and efficient brushless drills are. However, if you make this comparison for battery powered drills, the distinction is more evident.
The battery-powered brushless drill will not only last longer, it will also do more work than the brush drill counterpart.
It is then safe to say that brushless motors are more efficient. Brushless motors conserve more energy that can be used to do useful work.
Broadly speaking, every power drill is categorized as a cord and a cordless drill. Cord drills are the type of drills that have to be consistently connected to a power source for them to function. For this reason, they have power cords with plugs which are connected to a source of power.
The advantage of having a corded drill is that there is a guaranteed supply of power, and the power required for drilling is constant. This is not the case with cordless drills that use rechargeable batteries. Such drills are fit for specific operations and are readily available on Amazon .
The power supplied by the battery reduces as the battery discharges. More so, cord drills are better suited for drilling through very hard surfaces such as brick walls and concrete.
The cordless drills became popular in recent times. These are the portable category of the power tool. They do not require being connected to a power source to function. Rather, there are equipped with a rechargeable battery for their operation.
They are smaller and easier to use. They are greatly preferred, as they allow for work in remote corners of the house which may be far from a source of electricity. They also are handy and easy to use.
Battery Powered Cordless Drills
Cordless drills are now the most common drills one could lay his hands on these days. The most significant feature of cordless drills is the fact that they use batteries. These batteries are charged intermittently to store up electrical charges that power the drills when there are working.
Nickel Metal Hydride Batteries
One of the most commonly used batteries found in power drills are Nickel metal hydride (NiMh) batteries and can be bought on online stores . NiMh batteries are chiefly made up of sintered Titanium, Nickel, some specific alloys and NiOOH electrodes.
online stores
The metal M in the NiMh battery is usually an inter-metallic compound. In the early development of NiMh batteries, a lot of inter-metallic compounds were developed and experimented for use.
One of the greatest pitfalls of NiMh batteries is the fact that there are prone to memory effect and voltage depression. These results occur when the battery is not fully discharged repeatedly.
Another type of battery in use in cordless drills is the Nickel-cadmium battery. NiCd battery uses metallic cadmium and nickel oxide hydroxide electrodes. NiCd battery was invented in 1899 and rapidly gained market reputation in the late 1990s.
They offer a better cycle life when compared with other rechargeable batteries even at reduced temperatures.
They are notably more advantageous in applications that deliver at full capacity even at very high discharge rates. They are also suitable for applications where prolonged deep discharge is required.
Nickel-Cadmium Battery
NiCd batteries are however known to self-discharge at remarkably high rates. However in comparison with traditional batteries, it is slower. More so, NiCd batteries are quite expensive (but cheaper than Lithium-ion batteries). You can purchase one on Amazon.
purchase one on Amazon
NiCd batteries are also prone to memory effects as seen in NiMh batteries. It is however lesser in a NiCd batteries pack.
This NiCd batteries have low internal resistance and as a result, they are capable of delivering high large surge currents. This makes them one of the best batteries for use in cordless power tools and in remote-controlled devices (RC planes and Cars).
Lithium-ion Batteries
Lithium-ion batteries are the other category of rechargeable batteries used in cordless power tools. There are made using special intercalated compounds of lithium as the positive electrode. Graphite rods are then used as the negative electrode.
Unlike the Nickel-cadmium and nickel metallic hydride batteries, lithium-ion batteries do not have memory effects. They also possess a low self-discharge capacity and high energy density which makes them just about the best for your drill. You can get a Li-ion battery for your drill on Amazon.
on Amazon
However, lithium-ion batteries pose a safety hazard. This is because lithium-ion batteries are highly flammable and easily explodes.
How to Fix a Drill Battery that won't charge
One of the issues that often arise with batteries is that they could become defective, too hot to charge, worn out or unable to hold a charge.
Most drill manufacturers such as Ryobi, Makita, deWalt and Bosch whose products you can find on amazon incorporate a light indicator system. While charging the battery, the charger shows lights which indicate one of two possibilities. The first light is the blinking red light.
This light indicates that the battery is hot. Under such conditions, the battery will not hold a charge, and might require to be cooled.
What you need to do at this time, is to retrieve the battery from the charger, and allow it to cool. When it cools, you can then put it back into the charger.
The next indicator light is a flashing green and red light. This light could indicate one of two possibilities. It could simply mean that the battery is not properly seated on the charger. However, if you are sure this is not the case, then the other possibility is that the battery could be defective.
They are quick checks you could run at this time just to make sure the battery is really defective. One thing to do is to retrieve the battery. Clean the terminals with alcohol or some methylated spirit.
Disconnect the battery charger from the power source and also clean the terminals using the alcohol solution.
If the indicator continues to show the same light even after this exercise, then you have really got a battery problem in your hands. The diagnosis at this time is a dead battery. However, there are a number of remedies that could be employed in reviving the battery back to life.
Jump-start the Battery
Jump-starting your battery is more like electrocuting your battery. This is also one of the ways of joggling the battery back to life. Mind you, this operation is not recommended by battery manufacturers. However, the trick does work.
This is how it is done: get a functional and fully charged battery and connect it terminal to terminal with the dead battery. Make sure you use a 14-gauge copper wire.
You can ensure that the wire is properly connected to the terminals, by taping the wire to the terminals. Leave the set-up for about two minutes.
Go ahead and disconnect them. You can now connect your battery to the power drill. The battery will once again begin to work. This does not turn your battery into a new one. It however squeezes a number of cycles out of the battery. More so, the battery will not last as long as usual.
Reset the Memory of the Drill Battery
This practice only applies to batteries that have memory effects. Such batteries only include the NiMh and NiCd batteries.
Memory effect occurs when a battery is not fully drained before charging. When this practice becomes consistent, the battery resets and then only operates within such range. In some cases, it loses the capacity to hold charges.
To deal with this, you will need a large source of power. The most commonly used for this purpose is the 12V battery used in automobile. Connect jumper cables to the car battery in this manner- the black end for the negative terminal and the red end for the positive.
In a similar manner, touch the terminals of the Nickel-Cadmium or Nickel Metallic Hydride battery. The contact period should only last for a few seconds.
The effect of this connection is that it allows a power surge from the car battery into the NiCd battery. This surge then rids the battery of all the sulfate accumulations in it.
This fairly restores the battery to useful conditions while you get ready to purchase a new battery.
Here is a video that shows how to revive a NiCd drill battery:
How to Fix a Drill Battery That Won't Charge
Source: https://zimdrills.com/how-to-fix-a-drill-battery-that-wont-charge/