CORDLESS DRILL BATTERIES

It's the disposable society which the manufacturers have us live in. Spares are far to expensive so chuck the whole thing and buy all new. Sad and wrong but that the way of the modern world - fill the land with perfectly good items. I have a colour laser printer which cost £500. The four replacement cartridges cost £370. After two changes you wonder "shall I just have a whole new one with nice new guarantee etc?". My bubble jet cost £65 and the two replacement cartridges come to £62 so when the time comes I'll throw a perfectly good printer in the bin and buy a new one - the extra £3 will buy me a brand new printer, power lead, data lead and guarantee! Oh and a box which will also end up in a land fill. Batteries for some mobile phones cost over £60 whereas a brand new phone, exactly the same, would cost... nowt. FOC!

A new Bosch 14.4v drill/driver is available from Argos at £50. Cat No.

You can generally replace the cells inside, if you feel up to it.

Try Multicell. They will refurbish them.

You might check out

One thing that may or may not be relevent to your printer is that the cartridges that come with the printer may be lower capacity than standard. Have just ordered a laser printer. The standard toner cartridge has an expected life of 7200 pages, while the cartridge that is included with the printer is only 3600 pages.

recell do a very good service:

mrcheerful

Steve Barnes explained on 05/04/2004 :

With noting much to loose, you could always open up and rebuild the battery pack with a new set of cells.

You can buy re-fill ink with instructions for a few quid. And even those cartridges with the imbedded chip to prevent re-filling can be worked round - see Ebay for devices.

Yes but the point is that you shouldn't have to. Also the refilled ones are never quite as good as the print head is designed to wear out too. I found a refilled cartridge was OK until half way through using the second refill and then print quality was crap. Then there's the mess etc. We are in a disposable society.

But you can still get your shoes soled and heeled.

The facts of life are that the batteries are the only valuable part of a cordless. Each 14.4v pack probably has between 25 and 40 quids worth of cells in it.

IF you can get teh pack apart successfully, you can get new cells for it.

Disagree. What adds to the cost is packaging, logistics, storage, etc. Spare parts for anything are always highly priced. In 1973 a study was done on a Ford Escort. At the time they cost around £1000 but to build one from spare parts was in excess of 50k!

Problem lately is that "machines" are manufactured in cheap labour places such as the third world. They cost peanuts. Hence you can buy a brand new angle grinder for £9.99. Spares though have to packaged, listed, transported, stored, distributed, etc. so the cost is high. For an angle grinder costing £9.99 you can buy (if you're daft enough!) a new disc for £4.99. Says it all really.

I've been refilling the tanks on my venerable old Epson Stylus 600 for years, and the print head never deteriorated. Until I broke it. ;-)

Or you can get a NU TOOL 20 volt one for a few quid more. Beware of expensive imitations by the likes of Makita etc.

Wait and see how long the batteries don't last and poor their characteristics are in junk like Nu Tool.

The name is very apt.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

I know what you mean. Robbing filth!

I've been re-filling old Epson Stylus Color (black only - I gave up on the colour!) for years and it still works; 20 -month old Canon S820 looks like it's for the tip shortly. They don't make 'em like they used to.......

Richard

I had an Epson Stylus and threw it out.