Blew out a power tool battery by ignoring the blinking light

I was in the middle of replacing some rotted porch boards at my house in east Phoenix last Tuesday, and my drill started pulsing like a strobe light. You know that rapid blinking where you think maybe it's just a glitch? I ignored it for maybe 60 more seconds of driving screws, stupid move. It started smoking around the battery terminals, so I yanked it out and tossed it in the gravel before anything caught fire. Turns out the overload protection circuit fried itself because I kept pushing the battery past what it could handle on a 95 degree day. The fix cost me nothing but some embarrassment, just let the tool rest a full hour next time before finishing the job. I replaced that $80 battery with a $25 third-party one from a local electronics shop, and it's been running fine for a week now. Anyone else here ever nearly melt a battery by being too stubborn to stop?

2 comments

2 Comments

michaelchen16d ago

Yeah but the real thing nobody's talking about is how these tools handle heat. I'm over in Mesa and we hit 115 easy. That blinking light is basically the battery screaming "I'm cooking alive." You were in direct sun too probably. Those lithium packs don't just lose power when they get hot, the internal resistance changes and the protection circuitry can get confused and fail. I've had two Ryobi batteries puff up just from sitting in a hot truck bed for an afternoon. Next time try putting the battery in a cooler with an ice pack for 10 minutes before you use it. Not freezing it obviously, just cooling it down to like 80 degrees. You'll get way more life out of them.

the_wren16d ago

Michaelchen nailed it with the heat issue, I had a Dewalt battery swell up on me in Phoenix after just 15 minutes in a hot car. Bringing them inside to cool down before use saved my next set of packs from the same fate.