The leaf blower battery should be able to charge a laptop. The battery in the drill should charge the phone. And while we’re at it, why couldn’t our increasingly powerful USB-C power adapters also charge those power tool batteries?
Basically, there isn’t much difference between a battery bank you buy from Anker and a power tool battery from DeWalt – they both generally contain the same 18650 lithium-ion cells. But to do all this, the batteries of your power tools would need a powerful USB-C port.
And that hasn’t really been a thing…until now.
The $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add this port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in a snap. Slip this quarter-pound adapter into your battery pack and you get a 100W bi-directional USB-C PD port. That means you can not only charge a MacBook Pro-sized laptop with a large enough DeWalt pack, but you can also charge these DeWalt packs with the USB-C charger on your laptop or phone.
The adapter is compatible with everything from the cheap 1.3Ah packs that came with your loss leader combo kit to the massive 15Ah FlexVolt packs you’d probably only stick on stationary tools. It’s the biggest gadget charging battery you’re likely to find outside of dedicated power stations.
As someone with a garage drawer full of DeWalt batteries, I couldn’t wait to put it to the test. But it’s not the experience I dreamed of either.
Good material
- Works as advertised: 100W output, 100W input
- Compact
- Built like a tank
Bad things
- Expensive, and you can only buy the full kit for $99
- Not as useful with the smaller DeWalt battery packs
- Sometimes it may be difficult to charge completely dead batteries
How we rate and review devices
I’ve been testing the DeWalt DCB094 for months, and here’s the good news: it totally works.
I converted DeWalt’s 15Ah monster pack into an external USB-C battery that was capable of charging my wife’s 14-inch MacBook Pro (69.6Wh) three full times and still had gas in the tank. My Steam Deck? I charged its 40.04 Wh pack a full five times, that’s an extra 10 hours of Elden Ring right there. When I shot a nearly three-hour timelapse Lego build with my iPhone, I hooked it up to a DeWalt 6Ah pack knowing there was no way I’d run out of juice.
You get a 100W PD USB-C port and a 12W USB-A port. The USB-A port will also do pass-through charging while charging the DeWalt battery.
Every DeWalt 20V battery I tried, new or old, big or small, also worked with the adapter. This includes my two 1.5 Ah packs, one 1.7 Ah pack, the two 5 Ah packs that came with my lawnmower, and the two 6 Ah packs I bought about a year ago and that I rarely use. I recorded them all charging up to 100W in both directions through that USB-C port, enough to keep today’s (but not tomorrow’s) larger USB-C PD laptops running as they were plugged into the wall
When it came time to recharge those power tool batteries, the 100W USB-C port sometimes let me do it faster than DeWalt’s AC adapters. While DeWalt unfortunately only ships the DCB094 with a 65W USB-C charger, even that should offer a faster charge rate than the company’s cheaper AC adapters that include charging kits. drill or driver. And when I added my own separately purchased 100W USB-C charger, I was able to reduce the time with my DeWalt 4A (80W) AC adapter when charging the larger packs.
Here’s how quickly I charged these batteries and roughly how much I got out of them:
Time and load capacities
DeWalt Battery Battery Status 65W USB-C Charger + Adapter 100W USB-C Charger + Adapter DeWalt 4A Wall Charger (DCB115) Steam Deck Charge from DeWalt Battery* DeWalt Battery Battery Status USB Charger- 65W C + adapter 100W USB-C charger + adapter DeWalt 4A wall charger (DCB115) Steam Deck charging from DeWalt battery* 1.5Ah (30Wh) Moderately used 26 minutes 27 minutes
22 minutes
21Wh (half load) 1.7Ah (34Wh) Brand new 30 minutes 26 minutes 26 minutes 22.8Wh (half load) 4.0Ah (80Wh) Heavily used 55 minutes 51 minutes
47 minutes
48Wh (1 charge) 5Ah (100Wh) Moderately used 1h, 29m
1h, 5m
1h, 14m 66Wh (1.5 charges) 6Ah (120Wh) Little use 1h, 47m
1h, 24m
1h, 29m 84Wh (2 charges) 15Ah (300Wh) Brand new 4h, 33m
3h, 14m
4h, 6m 206Wh (5 charges) *Charging larger batteries for longer may be more efficient. With a 15Ah DeWalt battery, I saw closer to 224Wh charging a 69.6Wh MacBook Pro and closer to 240Wh charging a 100Wh USB-C battery bank.
The only problem I had was if I completely drained a battery, and I mean completely drained it – running it all the way on a leaf blower or drilling it repeatedly until it wouldn’t turn anymore, sometimes the adapter DeWalt wouldn’t light up. to charge when i put it on. Sometimes I had to trick it by connecting it to a different battery or charger first.
So if everything works so well, why am I giving this product a 6? Partly because The Verge just switched to a full 10-point scale for review scores to avoid score inflation – a 6 is still good! — but also partly because the benefits of the DeWalt adapter start to recede when you don’t pair it with a 15Ah battery that costs $389 on its own.
All the batteries I tried work, even a Chinese knockoff, but not all batteries are created equal. I wouldn’t bother with a small 1.5Ah battery. Nor the imitation, because the seller lied about its capacity.
With smaller batteries like my 1.5A, 1.7A and even 4Ah packs, they just didn’t charge the necessary devices long enough to justify getting them through a battery bank or traditional charger.
Part of this is likely due to transfer losses, which are not unique to DeWalt. You can’t fully charge a 100Wh portable battery with a 100Wh battery like DeWalt’s DCB205 because some of that energy doesn’t get through. (Some run off as heat, and I can attest that charging my 100Wh HyperJuice with the DeWalt adapter made the HyperJuice uncomfortably hot to the touch.) In general, I saw losses of between 20 and 33 percent with my rigs, for example the 6 Ah (120 Wh) DCB206 only gave me 80 Wh of Steam Deck battery life.
You can even charge DeWalt batteries very slowly with a 5V USB-A adapter in a pinch. It took 28.5 hours to recharge this DeWalt 6 Ah battery. Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
But that 6Ah battery is also a 2.5lb brick once you add the DeWalt adapter, double the weight of my HyperJuice, even assuming I don’t have to buy the DeWalt battery because I already have one for to my tools The DeWalt’s 5Ah battery is just a tad lighter, but maybe I’m only looking at 66Wh of power for my gadgets, and so on.
When you factor in the fact that DeWalt batteries are quite expensive and heavy for the capacity they usually offer, I can’t really recommend that anyone buy the DeWalt ecosystem just for this feature, unless you really need heavy duty batteries that can charge the your devices and power. tools in motion
But what if you already have a garage full of important DeWalt batteries that don’t get much use? I could see myself spending $100 if I didn’t already have a capable power bank or two. Between 5A charging speeds and 100W output for gadgets, there’s a lot to like.
Expand the load specifications.
Now, though, what I really want is for DeWalt and company to take the next obvious step: stick the USB-C port into the battery itself, so we don’t have to mess around with adapters. In January, DeWalt product manager Sean Fitzgibbons told me that the DCB094 could be a bit of a trial balloon: “If we get the interest that I hope we will, I think that would open the door a lot more to add- potentially there. this directly to the batteries on the road.”
I think DeWalt should do it. Many people would buy a native USB-C power tool battery never mind a $100 adapter that you have to plug in and unplug every time.