I have been having an issue with my Craftsman V20 lithium-ion batteries for quite a while. At first I thought that it was an issue with the batteries so I contacted Craftsman’s warranty support, found on their web site craftsman.com and had the batteries replaced. I did a video on my experience. Their support was fantastic and they replaced by “dead” batteries really quick. My issue was that the batteries showed fully charged but would not power my tools, mainly my leaf blower. The batteries did work on my LED worklight. I checked with my Ohm meter and the voltage checked out perfectly, 21 volts. The problem seemed to go away for the most part but returned this fall when leaf season returned.
Long story short is that this time of year the trees in my yard leave a lot of presents and I tend to blow off the yard every day or two. I know I drive the neighbors crazy but at least I’m using battery powered instead of gas powered. It takes at least 4 to 5 batteries to complete the job. Since I have so many batteries that need recharging I break out at least four chargers at a time.
All of a sudden I had two new batteries that showed being charged but they were “dead.” I put those aside and recharged another batch and had another 2 bad batteries.
I decided to investigate and I believe I may have found the culprits. The last 4 batteries that showed fully charged but failed to power my blower were charged on the model CMCB101 chargers. This is preliminary and I will take those chargers out of rotation and will see if I get better results. What I noticed on those chargers were that the Green LED turned off when the batteries were charged and that on my other two models of chargers the green LED changed from blinking to solid.
Now the next issue is how to get the bad batteries restarted since they were showing fully charged. I tried plugging them into my LED worklight and running it for a few hours then trying the battery on my blower, but that didn’t work. Next I grabbed my Craftsman drill to try. On the first pull of the trigger the drill’s light blinked and the motor moved just a little. On the second trigger pull the drill sprang to life and worked perfectly. I moved the battery to my blower and it powered up as expected. This process worked on the three remaining batteries. Now all of my batteries are back in my rotation.
This process did work for me. It might work for you too!
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