battery tools are crap

[bert]

+1

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Bill is cleverer than you.

[ARW]

Rusty and past it?

[damduck-egg]

I have , he had just found out it had been nicked.

Diverting the thread a bit some battery powered things like lawn mowers are claimed by their manufactures to be as powerful as petrol ones eg

though craftily they don't say exactly which petrol ones. Wonder what it would be in watts if it were mains, if over 1000 Watts would it be possible for an enterprising firm to make a cordless vacuum of that rating but because it could be charged from a charger less than 1000 watts it would get around the EU restriction, or have they sewn that up legally.

G.Harman

[tabbypurr]

No it's not, that's part of the whole point of battery tools. I have SDS and SDS max mains tools, and rarely would I even consider picking the max one. Extra power is far from always good to have.

Battery tools are great when you don't need the extra power and are willing to pay the price of shortish life for the time & effort saving. When you're not, stick with mains. For some jobs battery wins hands down, for some mains does.

NT

[Bill Wright]

Yes I used to use drills like that. They used to help with my erections.

You must look like me then, but less rugged maybe.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

Yes I have to agree they're pretty good. Our Paul has one and it's impressive. Not quite as good as my mains one though.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

It's better though when you hit a hard bit and the tool takes it in its stride. And as someone who has empathy with machines I (a) don't like to hear a tool's motor struggling and (b) I tape my mouth shut when I'm pissed and Hil's driving me home.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

This morning my bleary peer out of the window detected that a tree branch had fallen and smashed a fence. Not very far from the mains socket in the chicken shack so I was able to use the new toy without taking the genny up there. Magic! Very quick and easy it cut away the smashed bits and cut the new bits to fit, and then cut the branch up so I could drag it to the bonfire heap.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says. (Python)

Yes they're very good. I have two old ones and they'll do almost owt. Paul has the same thing but a newer type and that's the same.

Bill

[Jethro_uk]

Unless I've missed a trick, the most obvious problem with battery tools is the lack of in-car charging solutions ....

Surely tradesmen would find charging between jobs a handy feature ?

[Andy Burns]

rechargeable vacuums are excluded from the .eu power ratings

[Chris Green]

Cordless tool manufacturers don't seem to have (yet) discovered the cheap 'buck' converters you can get to step up (as well as down) DC voltages. I use these extensively on my boat (12 volt system, like a car) to provide efficient supplies for running several 9 volt devices like routers and switches (that's networking stuff, not woodworking) and also 19 volts and 20 volts for charging laptops.

Most cordless are now >12 volts so need a step up from the car's 12 volts.

You could use an inverter to provide 230 mains and then the cordless mains charger but it's almost certainly less efficient. Also you probably need a pure sine inverter for many switch mode chargers, I've killed big modified sine inverters with tiny switch mode supplies.

[FMurtz]

Aldi battery powered angle grinder is quieter even if weak and slow.

[FMurtz]

People that put up large metal sheds do almost the whole job with battery tools.

[John Rumm]

You mean like:

[damduck-egg]

Ta, I wonder if those who decided the regs thought that rechargeable vacuums would always be those lightweight things promoted at the moment. So it be could be possible for a manufacturer to make one using 36volt batteries like mower ones and promoted it as being more powerful than you can get from a mains one, whether they would have sufficient sales to make it worthwhile is debatable .

G.Harman

[damduck-egg]

Quite a few tradesmen by the very nature of their skills and work will have been aware of inverters that could be fitted to vehicles many years before the general public became aware of them and they reached the shelves of Halfords etc.

I think it was the early 80's when I purchased my first , 200 watt peak ISTR . Can't remember now if it was square wave or modified . If you wanted a real sine wave some firm was making a rotary converter device ,possibly called Redline or similar. My last van had an 800 watt one, as batterys had got better I rarely needed it for charging but it ran a couple of infra red heat lamps nicely positioned to act as a hair dryer and give instant heat on cold mornings and warm aching neck muscles on the way home.

G.Harman

[Jethro_uk]

Sledgehammer, nut though ? Stepping up to 230V just to step down to

9/12/18 ?????

[Bill Wright]

Argh! Damned with faint praise!

Bill