Cordless Drill Battery Care

That phone in your pocket is a modern miracle. Ditto the laptop on your desk, the tablet in your backpack, maybe even the watch on your wrist. And regardless of what each is capable of, they all have one cornerstone component to thank, one that you probably ought to know how to take care of: A Ryobi pwer tool battery.

The first step to knowing your device's battery is to narrow down the kind. The first kind you might think of (and the kind you probably grew up with) are nickel-metal hydride, or NiMH batteries. These, generally, are the ones that look like a normal disposable batteries, except you can plug them into a wall charger for some extra juice whenever your TV remote dies.

The batteries in your modern-day gadgets—from iPhones to laptops to Bluetooth headphones to tablets—are a different beast entirely. These are lithium-ion (aka li-ion) batteries, and they have some pretty significant advantages over NiMH and other rechargeable batteries that came before. Lithium-ion batteries are also totally different from straight-up lithium batteries, which aren't rechargeable.

That old saw about how you always need to charge you battery all the way up, and use it until it's dead? Memory effect, as it's called, affects NiMH batteries but it doesn't apply to your phone. In fact, you're phone's battery hates when you do that. Similarly, lithium-ion batteries don't need to be "calibrated" with a full charge and a full discharge when they're new power tool battery for AEG

Li-ions can pack a lot of power into a small size, and they don't lose too much of that energy to leakage when they're not in use. It's a combination of these factors that make them great for your portable gadgets.

How does a lithium-ion battery work?

It's easy to think of charging a battery as though you're filling a tub with "power." Just hook up the hose until it's full! From the outside, that's exactly how it works, but on the inside it's a little more nuanced.

A lithium-ion battery typically charges in two stages. First comes the process called constant current charging. This is the part that really is pretty simple. The charger for your phone or tablet will apply a steady current of electricity to the battery to get all those electrons back to the anode. During this stage, the charger just decides how much power is coming out of the firehose and starts spraying. The higher that constant current, the faster the battery can charge. High-voltage quick chargers—like the ones that are starting to come with a lot of new phones—take advantage of this first stage to cram in the juice as quickly as possible (at the cost of a bit of extra stress on the Black & Decker cordless drill battery).

When the battery is 70 percent recharged, the procedure changes and flips over to constant voltage charging. During this second stage, the charger makes sure that the voltage—that is, the difference in current between the battery and the charger—stays the same rather than keeping the current constant. Practically, this means that as the battery gets closer to full, the current the charger sends into it decreases. As the battery gets full, the rate at which it charges slows down. Once you reach 100 percent, the charge simply trickles in, just enough to account for the tiny, tiny bit of charge your battery loses naturally over time.