Uniting the Power Tool Universe: How to Make Ryobi Batteries Work Across Brands

The dumb days of handheld power tools have come to an end, thanks to a wave of battery-powered tools that have finally made it feasible to go cordless while replicating the power of older, noisy models. Today, it’s possible to work for long periods with a variety of handheld tools without being tethered to the nearest power outlet or having to drag along an air compressor. Toolmakers such as Ryobi, DeWalt, and Milwaukee are competing for the home do-it-yourself and construction market with their own ecosystems of battery-powered tools, which utilise proprietary battery packs.

But the innovation comes with tradeoffs: for instance, battery systems proprietary to one brand mean that your Ryobi batteries won’t magically power your DeWalt or Milwaukee tool – and vice versa. That limitation is particularly inconvenient for the passionate DIYer or professional builder who owns both cordless and power tools of mixed brands.

The Dilemma of Battery Compatibility

Ryobi batteries, which are designed for use only on Ryobi tools, have connectors and designs that don’t work well with other brands’ tools. The ONE+ series batteries are peg-connected; the 40V packs slide and snap. All Ryobi batteries are built for Ryobi tools, and that’s that.

CONNECT: Bridging the Gap with Battery Adapters

Fortunately, where there’s a will, there’s a workaround. Third-party manufacturers have stepped in to fill the gap in the market with battery adaptor solutions. These devices allow you to take your Ryobi batteries and stick them into another brand’s tools, but with a twist.

How Do Battery Adapters Work?

An example might be this nifty little adapter from a store that specialises in such things (click on this or any other photos for a larger view). It has a slot for the peg-connector end of the Ryobi battery, which sits flush against the bottom of the Ryobi tool, and a connector rail that reaches out over the top of the tool where the DeWalt tool’s connector rail would have been. The adapter is equipped on both ends, so you can plug in either way. In this case, the Ryobi battery, working through a kind of intermediary, powers the DeWalt tool.

But they are brand-specific applications – there is no Ryobi-to-DeWalt adapter designed for tapping into a Milwaukee tool, and so on. What’s more, there are serious limits to how much can be achieved in the realm of the physical and electrical features of discrete battery and tool combinations.

Proceed with Caution: Safety Concerns

And although a battery adapter might be more convenient than other options, you’re using a third-party product that you can’t get the original manufacturer of your tool to support. You can’t demand warranty or no-fault service. It might also not get the best performance out of your tools and batteries. Adapters can be inefficient, and your electric tools might not function as well, or even get damaged, because they weren’t designed to be used that way.

Use Adapters Wisely

If you’re using a battery adapter, think of it as a temporary fix or a low-impact solution, and avoid over-stressing your tools and batteries to prevent burning them out or frying them.

CONNECT: Optimizing Your Power Tool Collection

And there are no signs that a quest to slim down your toolbox and optimise the multitasking ability of your power tools will end there. Perhaps you’ll begin your bid for power ecosystem dominance by thinking through your tool purchases with connectivity in mind, or investing in one of today’s growing number of universal power tool batteries that claim to offer broader compatibility.

CONNECT: The Future of Power Tool Battery Ecosystems

For this reason, it could be only a matter of time before manufacturers follow the interoperability lead of consumers and transition to more standardised battery systems, if they haven’t already. Until then, battery adapters will provide evidence of humanity’s inventiveness in compensating for things like the erosion of innovation that proprietary technologies are designed to facilitate.

Connect to the Future

And who knows, maybe the capacity to bridge across even more brands is exactly the thing that is key to the evolution of the power tool industry going forward? Until then, give battery adapters the respect they deserve: they are the means by which we can reach across our set of tools – and every battery pack we own captures just a little more of this value.

What Is Connect?

Connect in this sense also evokes the physical representation of interoperability that battery adapters create in power-tool markets: a device that literally completes the circuit between Ryobi batteries and third-party tools, allowing power to flow freely from the former to the latter. With a couple of dollars and a half hour of fiddling, we can add greatly to the functionality of the tools in our shed, wherever that shed might be. In these uses, connect names the relation of mutual functional enhancement and global distribution. Battery adapters possess the ‘making real’ power of the desire for connectivity in power-tool landscapes.