REJUVENATE THAT OLD DEWALT 18 V NiCd BATTERY

hi there welcome back to the channel I'm Kent and this is Oakley's DIY home renovation today I thought I'd take a little break from the exterior prep for painting on the house and do a kind of a little how-to video on reviving these nickel cadmium batteries I have another video where I compared this 18 volt to the new 20 volt lithium ions that I bought and I'll put a link on that down below for you to go watch but I've got four of these lithium ion batteries here that don't really work don't work at all don't hold a charge or what little charge it gets it dies so what I'm going to do today is show you how we can revive these when I say show you this the first time I'm doing this so let's hope it works well if not I'll still post this video and you can see a failure now why am I doing this because hey if I can recharge these batteries and use them and get more use out of them I'm saving a whole bunch of money because to buy these I mean your 50 bucks apiece to buy them now you can also get them refurbished you can take them like here we can go to Batteries Plus and get them refurbished but they want $60 a battery to do that so if I can recharge these for like 7 bucks then I've saved a whole bunch of money and I've got 4 more batteries that work on my cordless tools here so what I have here is I've got a couple Dewalt chargers if you look on the charger here it gives you the keys to how the light what the blinking of the light tells you it says fast charge is a or PAC charging as a steady blink solid light that means it's charged if you've got a rapid blink that means battery packs bad and those are maybe the ones we need to pay attention here today and what we'll do is we'll put these in the charger and let you see what they're doing and then I've got a voltmeter here that I'm going to put on them and show that they're dead and then I've got the two good batteries that I'm going to use over here and I'll show you that they're fully charged now what are we how we doing is I'm gonna take I got some of these 1210 female connectors and what I'm gonna do is is if you look down in here at the clip if you see that clip what I'm going to do is take each one of those bins and fold them out so that they'll fit over the terminal on here and I've already done Nets on some and you can see bent out and then they'll fit right on these terminals like this so the other thing I've got I've got some red wire and black wires red for the positive black for the negative so I don't screw these up and this is just 14 gauge wire and so we'll get this all set up and and ready to go and then we'll come back and look at these batteries and see how bad they are so we've got my four batteries here I got two red wires and two black wires cut to the same length I've got four of these connectors opened up so they'll fit on here the first one I'm going to do is show you the charge on these so turn my little volt meter here to two volts and then a readout down here now the thing to remember is like say the red is the positive and black is the negative so if I put this on here and I get a negative number then I've got them switched so let's see if we can get this so you can see that alright so you read the number there so I've got the red one on this front wire or this front clip and the black on the back one and you see there's no negative number and it reads 4.9 so it's bad so let me reverse this so you can see what I'm talking about so black and then red and you see that negative number it says negative 0.4 so it means I got them wrong so I need to make sure that when I wire these up that I know which ones negative and which ones positive and the same thing for this battery here this one has nothing on it and it says negative I got them backwards next what we'll do because I'll put them in the charger over here and we'll see what they do so you want to look for this light right here look at this light right here so these are the older ones these are 2003 batteries let's see what it does so that light means it's charging and we'll leave it there a minute and see what happened because I have a feeling that's gonna say bad pack and I've got another one over here the lights right there if you can see that I'll put both of these on there and it's also flashing that it's charging so we'll let these set a minute and see what they do and in the meantime I'll show you how we're gonna hook these wires up what I'm going to do is take my wire strippers here I'm a stripper low this off put it down inside here and down inside here and crimp it and so since this is 14 gauge if you look on your deal there's the the if you look on your wire strippers it tells you what gauge each section is and you just put it in the one that's 14 just right there give it a crimp twist and a pull and then you've got your bare wires now you want to twist these because they're multifilament then we'll put it in here and then I'll crimp it right here on this part of the tool again it's 14 gauge so put it into 14 make sure I got my wire in there real tight give it a squeeze and do there we go let me do another one just get the other ones done and then I can come back and fix that one oh let's go over here if you look see that bad battery pack so we'll take this out and if you look now the other one is doing the same thing see the quick flashing light so again the battery packs bad take that out and let's see what it happens to flash at it especially it's showing zero so put these over here and I'll put these other two in here and see what they do and again they're flashing like they're charging we'll let them do that we'll go back to our wire thing and then when they start flash bad battery pack I'll come back to that alright so I got this wire cutting strip put this in here get it seated in there real good put it in the 14 slot and give it a squeeze nice and tight hooked in good to go oh wait a minute this battery pack over here it's already flashing bad pack this one still says it's charging what I'll do is I'll put all these batteries in my drill over here before we get started to see what kind of power they have so I'll show you how I get these spread out I just take a small little screwdriver put it inside here and give it a twist on each side kind of go in there a little bit further twist and twist that spread them out and now I'll just make sure they fit on the end here yep nice and tight so we get the wires hooked back up and we'll get started okay so these are the three batteries we've already checked and there flashed up bad pack the one that's still in there and it's still charging and I think that one will charge all the way but they're gonna go to use it it has no power but in the meantime let's just check what these have to say determine which is negative and which is positive so that we know and we'll move on to the next part so this first battery you can see right there it says 42 and it has a negative now I am on my volts but we'll try it in a drill and see what it does this one says zero alright let's try this newer battery and see what it does and it's reading all kind of crazy numbers so let's try them in the drill and see what it does this is a good battery here this is the other good battery let's try these three no nothing nothing so these two don't work at all so it'll be interesting to see if this jumps these so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to push these out of the way and bring down the good batteries and show you how we're gonna hook these up so I've got three wires one red to red and one black so what I have to do is you have to hook the positive from one battery to the negative to the other basically you're hooking these in series so positive to negative and then this positive will just be an open end because that's what will touch the bad batteries to charge and then this negative again will be an open end to put on the bad batteries to charge them so let's see what these batteries read so again red is positive it's positive negative we got nineteen point three eight nineteen point five so this one here the front side is the positive line what we want to do this is the positive we want to hook a positive of this one to the negative of this battery and then what what you want to do if that's the positive and this is the negative then this is the negative here so I'll hook the black wire to the negative so I know that that's always the negative and this is the positive because this is positive to negative so this has to leave the negative and I'll put the red wire on that now we're we're in sync our series as I say so what I'm going to do is I'm hooking my voltmeter up to it and see what kind of reading we get we should get somewhere around 38 so that's the negative so black the black and red to red you can see that we're getting 38.8 so we're good so now what do you do so what you do is is you take your bad battery and again you got to know which side is negative and which side is positive this is a 2011 battery these batteries here 2017 this one's a Japan battery and both of these are Mexico made batteries so to be sure I'm doing this right I'm going to test it so I'm getting a positive number so that means this is the positive in the back as the negative just like this the front of these or positive in the back is negative just like this is so positive negative because what you have to do is you put you put your negative on here and I'll just show you and you touch this positive to the positive in and you'll get some sparks and you just kind of touch and touch and touch you don't put it on there and hold it and then we'll retest and see what we got okay to see we have Oh got six so I'm gonna go ahead and make a clip for this and put it on here so all I have to do is just touch touch touch alright so I got this set up now all I'm gonna do is tap on the positive and as you saw if you leave it there too long it actually kind of welds to it and what we're looking to do is charge this up to 20 and if you remember back we got all kind of crazy number and negative and now he's got six do we got ten so we keep going it's probably gonna take a little bit because I don't know how long each one needs to be tapped Oh up to 14 and a half and we're trying to do is fool the charger into thinking it's a good battery and charging it still 15 I think we're gonna leave it there and we'll put it on a charger and see this may actually be a bad pack that's just not going to charge all right now time for the older batteries so the back is negative just like this all right battery number two actually I think what I'll do is I'll go ahead and put this one we just did on the charger and see what happens you're there jumped all the way to 18 17 eight just goes to show it each battery is a little different as to how it's gonna work 19 for about to get this one and just to let you know that other battery I put on is still flashing as a good charge but I believe this is the one that it'll charge but when I go to use it I get about two minutes of work out of it and then it's dead this may seem like a pain but for the money you're saving it'sit's definitely worth it there we go 20 oh they did just a little I'm gonna do another tap to get it truly at 20 and as far as money spent I think in the wire and these little connectors here I may have eight bucks the voltmeter already had so I mean let's say head to buy the voltmeter and it's 25 so for $35 if I can recharge four batteries when each batteries 50 60 bucks apiece I mean I think that's very well worth it like that's best we're gonna get so the battery did that we didn't get all the way to 18 st. fully charged so I'm gonna take it off and put it on my drill and see what we get and then I'm this better we just did I'm gonna put on there and see how it charges you see it's a solid line and then this is the one we're waiting on it's still charging and if it's a good battery in charges it takes about an hour but this one didn't take very long so I have a feeling there's something I work very well and if not we'll try and jump it some more but then we'll put this other battery let's put the battery we just did on there and this is the one we want to keep an eye on that's the one we just charged up so far so good so let's put this with this battery here and the drill and see what happens it sounds pretty good so what I'm gonna do is hold it and see if it dies really quick remember that sound there's known good battery a little higher pitch so I've probably got a little more deep put but let's check it and see what it says 14 so it's not as good we'll try and jump it some more here but no I got another battery won't work on but at least it works as you saw earlier they didn't work at all so let's put this as a good recharge battery right there we know it's it's a 2011 these are 2017 so I won't screw those up so let's go to this battery here and again the front side should be the positive I like five let's plug this back in again the positive to the negative the positive to the out put this on as you can see it takes a little more than just a couple taps you got to do a few taps to get the jump on but here we are 20.7 good so waiting for those to charge come back remember this is the one we already set on the charger and it read 14 so we're gonna try and bump it again and see if we can't get it to 20 no one more time and that may be all we're gonna get theirs which means there's a bad cell in here and to get this to work I'm gonna need to take it apart and replace the cell which I'm not going to do because this newer battery case has a tamper-proof seal and I don't just taking these screws out I can't get it off and I'm not sure what's I don't want to just pry and pry till it breaks because I can still kind of use the battery so we'll see what we can do here looks like that's all we're gonna get batteries getting a little warm so there's one or two about the see that usually reads about there's probably two or three dead cells in here and so to truly fix this would mean tear this apart find those two cells and replace it but honestly I'm not going to go through all that if it'll work I'm gonna pry it back in here but if it'll work and run this for any decent amount of time I'll go ahead and keep using it so we've got one battery charging the two that were already charged waiting and the fourth battery just stopped blinking [Music] okay so this is the one we got 220 I believe let me double check here no this one get was the one we got to 18 either when we got the 20s in there this one here is the 14 yeah and this is the one that just come off the charger that it charged and we'll see what it reads and we'll run it through there and determine if we're going to do anything with it it reads at 11 so all that and it really been charged but let's see how much it runs in here it powers it let's see if we can revive it up to 2012 and this one battery let me show you over here solid light and you can see that one's still blinking so I'm gonna take this one off and check it and then put this one on there this one you double-check like this is the 14 yes that's the 14 so take this off put the 14 when I say 14 the one had only charged at 14 put it back on there it's kind of charging light 19 see how it sounds now you remember these are the 2003 batteries I got nothing zero work out of them that one sounds as good as this let's do a sound comparison it's really all I can do I mean we've still got [Music] well I definitely got one good battery out of doing this this one here is good so I'm gonna set it up out of the way and I'm gonna get a mark and put a put a G on that for good so I know that one's really good let's go over here this is flashing hot pack it's got a dash and a quick quick light - and a quick light it's signaling the hot pack so I had to take this off and let it cool down and then I'll put it back on a little bit later and see how it does we can test it and see what it does sounds pretty good just for funsies let's test and see what it reads thirteen seven alright so I'll put this one on charge it's kind of hot right here I'm gonna let this cool down I'll put it on the charger and this one over here is reading charged solid light so I'll take it off see what it bolts out at and test it on the drill volts out of twenty one there what this one did nineteen so these 2003 batteries they jump back really well let's see how they sound very good now we'll compare it to a known good battery sounds really good this one this is the 18 so these two batteries here are good and I'll put those aside and put G's on them and then I'm letting these other to cool down and we'll put them back in and see what we get 18 for 18 v sound good so let me set these here as good batteries put these up all the way those are two new batteries basically so out of four so far I got two they're gonna be really good and maybe - they're gonna be mediocre and I think that's a that's a good outcome so I'll let these cool I'll put them on the Chargers and we'll come back and see you again alright it's been a couple of days since we rejuvenated all these batteries probably more like four days and so something interesting has happened as I went to recheck these batteries before I charge those two batteries that only got up to 14 volts is that the two black batteries that I was able to get up to the 19 volt are now dead they didn't hold the charge for mourn enough well I don't know how long they held it been about 4 days and they're dead I get nothing when I put the want to put the drill on barely anything nothing whereas the two batteries that I used to charge them up or rejuvenate them are still good now the other interesting thing well here let me show you on these it only got the 14 volts nothing so you get the other interesting thing is that when I took the voltmeter to them they all read zero so what does that mean well I don't really know so what I'm going to do is I'll show you that and then I'm gonna put them on the charger and let them charge and let's see if they come back to life and run and all that but I'm also going to try and reheat these for the ones that only went up to 14 volts and see if I can get them up to 19 but I'll show you first is what the voltage is on these two batteries in series now remember 18 18 is 36 and I'll show you that those are still good and then we'll go to the other batteries that don't show anything so this is the good batteries the two batteries that are hooked together as you see it's reading 38 now let's go to the first battery that I got to go up to 19 and see what it reads leads to the other 1.8 now the two batteries that only went to 14 volts the first one 0 the second one too so as you can see while it rejuvenated them and charged them what I don't know is if they've gone back to worthless again so I say what I'm going to do is I'm gonna put these 2 black ones here back on the charger I don't know if it makes a difference these are both Mexico batteries and the other two that only went up to 14 or japanese batteries and these two batteries that are still good up here in mexico batteries might be a little theme going on there so we'll put these on and see if they're going to try normally are they going to throw out a bad pack light or not so let's do that next all right let's put them on steady blinks like that means it's charging we'll give it a couple minutes so far so good so let me hit these other two and see if I can get them higher than 14 and what kind of keep an eye on those and see what happens so what I'm going to do is I'm not going to bore you with going through all this again I'll do this off camera and get back to you when I got it done and maybe by then these other batteries will be charged and we can recheck them again okay we're back now this battery here the best I could get it up to was ten point four seven no matter what I do it's worth stay 6 4 6 4 7 this other one again best I could get it up to was four point one four point eight oh eight something like that so we'll see what happens now surprisingly these two batteries are already charged so I'm going to take them off of there and we'll run them on a drill and see how they do remember the one on the Left I'm going to put the four the one only got two four and the one on the right will be the one that I only got two ten and we'll see how they charge so as you see the lights are flashing as a charge if they're a bad battery pack they flicker so they're charging so now let's move over to these batteries and see what we get on them and get eleven this ain't looking too good 17 9 let's see how they run sounds good not so good so let's see what happens this is the one that only got to what was it ten eighty nine let me spark it a little and see if it jumps it up not getting much of a spark out of it Oh almost twenty one we hit it one more time and then I'll put them back on the charger twenty one twenty if you remember this one was only about ten I think losing it though here that this one was not quite eighteen sounds good see if we spark it up to 21 19 seven see what it does sounds good so that one still sounds really good this one here is you've heard it before it went off real strong like that and then started to fade say as a comparison let me take one of these good ones so you can hear what it sounds like and it's I mean it's practically fairly charged notes to sound the same so the fully charged one on the right the one who kept the charge and the less charge when the one didn't sound as good when I bumped it with the battery went up to twenty one and then back down I'm gonna recharge them after these are done and as you see they're blinking like a full charge so we'll let those fully charged well test them we'll put these back on and see what they show and then we'll test them and we'll go from there alright we're back again and as you can see the one on the Left says charged now if you remember right that one was the one no one came up to a little over six and the other ones still charging so I'm going to take this one off and I'll put this black one back on and if you remember this one got up to 21 and had good power but it quickly died off so we'll see what happens stay in charge is a good battery so let me test this one that we just took off and see what we get six that's all we get let's see what kind of power we have in the drill not a lot and it's dying so it works a little we'll have to see how well it works as actual driving screws and stuff but it's not what I hoped okay we're back they've all finished charging and both of these charged full this one here I believe was the one that charged that we sparked back up to twenty or something and this one here I think was the one that you know we only got to about nineteen but as you can see they all sound the same so I'd say these two these two batteries here back to being good now the interesting thing is is this one here that we could only get up to about six wound up flashing has a bad battery pack so I'm gonna stick it back in there and see if it'll do it again says it's charging we'll see now this one here was the one that we couldn't get above ten I believe yes and while it doesn't sound quite the same it does sound like it does have enough power to probably do some work so while this one isn't as good as those I think I can get a little bit out and this is the one that charged to ten or we got to Reese Park back up to about ten so I'm gonna leave that one right there for a second and watch it charge and see how it goes too bad battery pack but I need you to know is this wasn't my original idea I actually got this idea off of a youtube video and I'll leave a link to it down below but what's a little different here than what his was is when he did his everything worked out you know hunky-dory he charged all up got him all up to 20 put him into charge of the charge they work what he didn't do is let a few days lapse and see what happens like I have done and as you see by doing so the battery went dead I don't know how long the charge held but obviously didn't hold as long as the good batteries because they're still good but they were able to be recharged up and the other thing is as it showed with these two that only got the 14 that really only one of them is any good and the other one is not even if I ever try to recharge him so yep there we go see how it's flashing fast that means a bad battery pack so I'll just take this out we'll put it in here and nothing I'll do a quick check here the voltmeter and see what we get I get like 0.4 so that one's bad so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stop the video and then tomorrow I'm gonna come back and plug each one of these in I shouldn't say each one this one's dead but I'm at least gonna do the voltmeter to eat these three and then tomorrow what I'm going to do is I'm gonna come back I'll put the voltmeter on each one of these put them on the drill and see if we have any power and kind of go from there it may be that you have we got these batteries recharged but it may be they're only good for a one day use okay we're back it's the next day and here's this two good batteries and then the one that didn't charge very well is over here so what I'm going to do first is I'm gonna hook the voltmeter up to them and see what they read and then I'm gonna put them into the drill and see what kind of power we get so let's start out with the voltmeter here so I've only lost three three and a half it's at sixteen point five let's go the other one now I don't remember which one of these charge to twenty and which one went to twenty one but this one here is at 13 so it lost quite a bit so those two we're still holding to charge let's see about this one if you remember this one when we got to about ten so let's see what it does now seven point eight so I point seven eight okay and just for giggles we'll do the one that's dead and see what it says yeah it's dead as a doornail okay so now let's try them into drills all right this is the good battery and case you're wondering we can check its voltage this is one of the ones we've been using to rejuvenate these with and it's still eighteen and a half so it's still a good battery all right so let's try the bad one if you will compared to these two and see what we get still sound and strong I shouldn't say strong but but to me it sounds the same as it did yesterday all right let's try these maybe a little less decreased yeah you definitely tell that this has lost some power and compare it to this one the good battery so there you go so we've gotten three out of these four batteries back to life while they're not at what a brand new battery is they at least going to be able to work and do some drilling or screw driving or whatever we want to do compared to what I had from them before which was nothing so out of these four I got three reusable batteries while they're not back to a hundred percent I would say these are pretty close they're just not going to hold the charge as long this one's you know 80% of it maybe and at least get some use out of it so with that now I've got five eighteen volt batteries on top of the new 20 volt batteries that I just purchased well I did this with the DeWalt because that's what I have I'm sure that if you have you know the other brands of cordless tools that use nickel-cadmium batteries you could do this same test to them and hopefully rejuvenate some of your old batteries back to life without having to buy new ones that are in this little demonstration I hope you found this educational and interesting enough that you can go out and rejuvenate some of your batteries if you happen to have some dead cell batteries that'll maybe get you along a little further and your projects with that we'll see on the next video thank you

Channel: Oakley's DIY Home Renovation

Views: 1,090,055

Keywords: NiCd, 18 V NiCd, Dewalt, Rejuvenate, Battery, DIY, Home Renovation, Oakley's, DIY Home, DIY Renovationn, How To, Dewalt 18 V, Restore, Renew, Repair, FIx

Id: HLlPXvD6AgM

Length: 41min 36sec (2496 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020