DeWalt USB-C Charging Kit review: Your power tool battery can now charge gadgets

The battery of your leaf blower should be able to charge a laptop. The drill battery should charge your phone. And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t we stronger than ever Will USB-C power adapters be able to charge these power tool batteries as well?

Basically, there’s not much difference between a battery bank you buy from Anker and a battery for a DeWalt power tool – they both generally have the same thing. 18650 Li-ion Cell. But to do all that, the power tool batteries will need a powerful USB-C port.

And that wasn’t really a thing… until now.

This $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add this port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in no time. Slide this quarter-pound adapter onto your battery pack, and you’ve got a coil bidirectional USB-C PD 100W port. This means that you can not only charge up to a MacBook Pro sized laptop with a large enough DeWalt bundle, but you can also charge those DeWalt bundles using your laptop or phone’s USB-C charger.

The adapter supports everything from the cheap 1.3Ah packages that come with the loss leader combo kit to FlexVolt massive 15Ah packages Chances are you’ll stick with the static tools only. It’s the biggest battery charger you’ll ever find outside Dedicated power stations.

As someone with a garage drawer full of DeWalt batteries, I couldn’t wait to test it out. But it is not so far The experience I’ve been dreaming of.

How do we rate and review devices?

I’ve been testing on and off the DeWalt DCB094 for several months, and here’s the good news: It works just fine.

I converted DeWalt’s monster 15Ah bundle into a USB-C external battery that was able to charge my wife MacBook Pro 14 inch (69.6Wh) three full times and the gas is still in the tank. Mine steam surface? I charged a 40.04Wh package five full times – that’s an extra 10 hours of elden ring right there. when i’m shooting Lego building takes about three hours With my iPhone, I hooked it up to a DeWalt 6A pack knowing it was there No way It will run out of juice.

Every DeWalt 20V battery I’ve tried, new or old, big or small, worked with the adapter as well. This includes the two 1.5 amp pack, the 1.7 amp pack, the two 5 amp packs that came with the lawn mower, and my 6 amp pack that I bought about a year ago and rarely use. I’ve recorded them all charging up to 100W in both directions via the USB-C port, which is enough to keep the day going (but not tomorrowThe largest USB-C PD laptops work just as if they were plugged into a wall.

When it came time to recharge this power tool’s batteries, the 100W USB-C port sometimes allowed me to do so faster than DeWalt’s AC adapters, too. While DeWalt unfortunately only ships the DCB094 with a 65W USB-C charger, even that should provide a faster charging rate than the company’s cheaper AC adapters that come with drill or driver kits. And when I added a separately purchased 100W USB-C charger, I was able to cut the time on the DeWalt 4A (80W) AC adapter when charging the largest packages.

Here’s how quickly these batteries charge and roughly how much you extracted from them:

The only problem I had is that if I used up a whole battery, I mean completely Drain it – run it all the way in a leaf blower or dig in frequently so it doesn’t spin more – sometimes the DeWalt charging adapter won’t light up when I put it on. Sometimes I’ve had to trick it by connecting it to a different battery or charger first. Oh, and you can’t charge one DeWalt battery with another DeWalt battery with two adapters. I tried.

So if pretty much everything works beautifully, why would I give this product a 6? Partly because the edge Just moved to a full 10-point scale of review results To avoid inflated points – 6 is still good! – but also partly because the advantages of the DeWalt adapter start to recede when you are Not Pair it with a 15-amp battery that costs just $389.

With smaller batteries like 1.5Ah, 1.7Ah, and even 4Ah packs, they simply don’t charge devices in need long enough to justify reaching them via a bank or a traditional battery charger.

Part of that is likely due to transfer losses, which are not limited to DeWalt. You can’t charge a 100Wh laptop battery with a 100Wh battery like DeWalt’s DCB205 because some of that power doesn’t reach it. (Some spends as heat, and I can attest to that charging My 100Wh HyperJuice With the DeWalt adapter it made HyperJuice uncomfortably hot to the touch.) Overall, I’ve seen losses of between 20 percent and 33 percent with my devices—for example, a 6Ah (120Wh) DCB206 gave me only 80Wh of Steam Deck battery life.

Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge

But this 6Ah battery is also a 2.5lb brick once I add the DeWalt adapter – twice the weight of my HyperJuice, even assuming I don’t have to buy a DeWalt battery since I already have one for my tools. The DeWalt 5Ah battery is a little lighter, but then I might just be looking at 66Wh of power for my devices, etc.

When you consider the fact that DeWalt batteries are very expensive and heavy for the capacity they usually offer, I can’t really recommend someone to buy in the DeWalt ecosystem just for that feature, unless you really need bumpy, rough, tough Batteries that can charge your devices And the Power tools on the go.

But if you previously You have a garage full of bulky DeWalt batteries that you don’t use often? I could see myself spending $100 if I didn’t already have a capable power bank or two. Between the 5A charging speeds and the devices’ 100W output, there’s a lot to like.

Now, though, what I really want is for DeWalt and the company to take the obvious next step: stick the USB-C port to the battery itself, so we don’t need to mess with the adapters at all. in januaryDeWalt’s product manager, Shaun Fitzgibbons, told me that the DCB094 could be a kind of test balloon: “If we get the attention I expect we’ll get, I think that will open the door a lot to add that directly to the batteries along the way.”

I think DeWalt should do just that. Many people will buy a genuine USB-C power tool battery who would never think of a $100 adapter that has to be turned on and off every time.