So how do you recharge a Craftsman V20 battery? It’s quite easy. It only takes a few steps once you know the process.
First, remove pack from your power tool. This not only allows for a quick check of its status but also make sure that it is safe.
Troubleshooting charging issues
The battery has a button on the side that’s an indicator; before plugging into anything, you push the button and see what percent of charge are left. It’ll let you know immediately whether you should bother or not, as it displays current amount of charge, clearly. Oftentimes it’s enough to get your job done without having to wait at all.
The charger has a socket where you slide battery inside and then press down on the battery until it click into place. When it does, you know the battery is secure and ready to recieve some juice.
Then the charger begin recharging the battery instantly. The charge unit will have a small light on it (green) that blinks as it’s charging.
The charging speed depend mostly on the size of the battery pack being charged. The V20 2.0Ah battery will take approximately forty five minutes to charge, which isn’t more bad for most household applications. If you’re charging a larger battery like their 4.0Ah unit, it’ll require nearly double that amount of time to completely charge.
If you’re planning to use this on some heavier duty tool, keep in mind that they will require long periods of time to be ready for use.
For users who want to maximize their pack weight, they’ll need to have a little extra patience because both the 6.0Ah and 9.0Ah packs will take over an hour to reach full charge (in fact), it can be two hours or longer before it’s done.
Again, that’s because there is just more juice in those cells, and trying to rush it could compromise the battery chemistry.
You should also take care to know when to unplug the charger. When you see the indicator light become solid green, the battery are fully charged.
If the light is flashing, it’s not quite there yet, so don’t pull the battery off the charger until the light goes solid green. After the solid green light, carefully lift battery off the charger base, then glance at the indicator again to verify the bars is showing full charge.
However, there are times when things don’t work properly while trying to charge. The charger might display a blinking red light during the process. That typically means something went wrong with connection quality or the battery health. This could be due to worn out contacts or dirty ones.
It can also be related to temperature. If it’s either very cold or hot outside, the charger will react accordingly and have an impact on charging success. In that case, both green and red lights blink, but the second one is solid. And then it pause the charge cycle until everything is OK again.
Thermal protection matters to me when leaving batteries out in very cold or hot conditions. They don’t damage the lithium-ion cells within, so you bring the battery back inside where it will come up to an acceptable operating temperature again and you continue charging like normal.
The only issue is if you have a communication error or a bad battery because in those rare instances there are just no lights to be seen on charger unit at all. Sometimes just resetting the system via some button pushing on the charger would of get things talking to each other again.
Once you confirm that the charger is on and set correctly, remove the battery from your tool, then slip it back in. It clicks into place as solidly as it used too, and off you go with your drill for whatever the job of the day might be.
When you have a full pack, knowing you have a reliable power source waiting in reserve makes all the difference in feeling confident about how long your workday will last.
