Did you just put your Ryobi battery on the charger and the indicators started flashing red and green? I can tell you it’s bad news. But, there’s also good news to go along with it.
It’s best not to keep trying to charge the battery when this happens. Instead, try following all the stuff I’ll talk about in the list under this. With everything I’ll cover, you’re sure to find a fix for your issue.
Read: How I Fixed My Ryobi Battery Charger Not Working No Lights
3 Ways To Deal With A Ryobi Battery Charger Flashing Red and Green
- Unstable Connection
Red and green flashing on a Ryobi charger indicates some kind of problem with the battery. Basically, the battery you have on the charger isn’t accepting power from it.
Now, this often signals a dead battery that can’t charge anymore. Before you decide on something so extreme being the case, though, I suggest checking the connection between both things.
Power flowing between the charger and battery isn’t possible without a good connection between them. If there’s something wrong with that connection, like it being loose, then the charge won’t transfer.
During a loose connection, the charger will still recognize that a battery is connected. Due to no power flowing, it will show the red and green lights though, since it thinks the battery isn’t accepting charge.
My first suggestion is to just push down hard on the battery. Carefully use force to make it click down after taking it out and trying to put it back in. That’s really enough to fix this problem sometimes.
I also suggest giving the connection points a good cleaning. The prongs on the charger may be dirty. Cleaning them out, as well as the points on the battery, might resolve the issue.
That dirt can get in the way of both things and stop charge from flowing into the battery, leading to the red and green lights because of the unstable connection.
In case you’re curious, I have a video which discusses the different meanings of the indicator lights on a Ryobi charger including the flashing red and green lights. You can watch it below.
But before you watch it, I would like to mention that there are different types of Ryobi charger and each model has a different light code.
This means the light codes that I show on this video maybe different from the other models of the Ryobi charger. So the indicator lights meanings shown on this video only applies to the Ryobi charger model here.
Here’s the summary: a blinking green means the battery is charging, a solid green means the battery is now fully charged, a blinking red means a hot/cold relay, and a blinking red and green means a bad battery.
- Parasitic Battery Drain
Parasitic battery drain is one of the worst things that can happen to batteries like Ryobi ones. These happen when users leave their batteries on the tools that they use, which is a common mistake.
After they’re left on a tool, Ryobi batteries (or any other batteries for that matter) will slowly start to drain more and more. The tool will keep extracting charge from them.
If you end up leaving a battery like this for weeks, the tool will start draining the cells entirely. Even when there’s no more charge left in the battery, power will continue flowing little by little.
Ultimately, this lowers the voltage on the cells, and ends up “killing” them. They no longer accept charge normally, and that’s why a battery suffering from this will flash red and green on the Ryobi charger.
One way to get them back running again is to revive the cells affected by parasitic battery drain. The only way to do this is to jumpstart the battery. That will get it working again.
Jumpstarting the battery will recover the voltages of the cells inside. Normal voltages mean that the battery will function like usual and start charging without the red and green lights showing up.
To jumpstart, you’ll need another similar Ryobi model. For example, I have a Ryobi 18V Lithium battery, like in the photo I shared earlier. That means I would need another 18V one for my battery.
After getting the second battery, connect their corresponding terminals with a wire. That connection will spread power from the functioning battery’s cells to the faulty battery’s cells.
Once you put a functioning battery on top of the Ryobi charger, it should work like normal. You won’t see the red and green lights flashing on it anymore as long as the battery is healthy.
You can also watch the short video I made about how you can do this. As you can see after I put the battery back on the Ryobi charger, it began to charge normally.
- Listen To The Red and Green Lights
Earlier, I mentioned how these lights usually indicate a dying battery. Well, if even jumpstarting doesn’t work, you can assume that the lights are correct, and your battery is fully dead.
Any properly functioning battery will light up, even if it has very little charge. You can see mine lighting up in the image down there. But, completely dead ones won’t do that.
If you want to be 100% sure that that battery is dead, you can take the cells out and check if their voltage is much lower than what’s listed on the battery pack. At the end of the day, it’s time to get a replacement.
New batteries shouldn’t show the red and green lights when you plug them into the Ryobi charger. They’ll charge as intended and only show the green flashing lights to indicate proper charging.
It’s not exactly a fix like the other two things I mentioned. Unfortunately, it’s the last resort if the battery is dead and not reviving.
