One day your Worx 40V battery will fail to charge. You’ll put it on the charger and it won’t take a charge. It might become completely dead and refuse to accept power from the charger. What do you do with it?
Don’t throw it away! That thing costs money. Before throwing it away, save those batteries if at all possible.
Using a DC Power Supply
When voltage falls below a certain point in the pack, the internal protection circuit can become locked up. The lock prevents current from entering the cells. This is great for safety. It can also be annoying.
Bump it right there, and you’ll find that the charger will see the pack and work.
There’s two primary methods of doing the reset. Method one is with a completely different battery pack. Method two is with some sort of DC power supply. Both applies direct voltage externally across terminals to skip the regular charging pins on the adapter.
This one’s easy in concept. All you’ll need is an extra 40V battery with some juice left on it. For testing purposes, I used a DeWalt 40V pack. Brand doesn’t necessarily matter for this test. Compatible, high-voltage lithium ion packs will work.
Be sure to get your polarity correct each time. Inverting positive and negative leads results in instant failure.
First, inspect the dead Worx battery to find its terminals. Look for the ones at the bottom of the mounting plate, as they are the contacts. One should be marked either plus or minus; one is positive and the other negative.
Test with a multimeter. Do this first by checking your reference battery. It will confirm if the plus and minus signs is in the right place.
Once you know where the terminals are, it’s easy to make the connections. For this part you’ll use two alligator-clip wires. Clip one to the donor battery’s positive post. Clip the second end to the Worx pack’s positive post. Do the same on the negative side: connect the negative lead to the donor battery’s negative post.
Now you have a closed loop between the two packs. Make sure they are held tight so that they make good contact with each other. The dead pack starts taking in juice from the live pack.
Leave them on long enough (about fifteen seconds total) so that the logic board resets. A brief shot like this should of been all it takes. Don’t leave them plugged together any longer than needed.
The jump start process involves safety. The current will flow fast from one power source to another. Watch the connection points closely and disconnect immediately if wires start smoking or melting.
If you see any smoke or melting, immediately disconnect. Shorts are bad and can be harmful. Always keep it short and controlled.
After 15 seconds, unplug the wires gently. Now we see a little charge on the dead pack. It’s not showing as zero volts anymore. This makes the next step easier.
Reattach the Worx battery to your regular charger. This time, the charge indicator light comes on right away.
Another way is with a DC power supply unit. That way, you have more control of what’s coming into it. For this application, set your supply to put out about 30-40 volts. Current limit should be set at no more than one ampere. That keeps the internal cells from getting too much juice when waking up.
Setting up the power supply takes a minute or two. Dial in the correct voltage range first. Thirty volts is usually enough to trigger the reset logic. Forty volts is safe for these lithium ion chemistry packs. Connect the positive lead to the positive terminal again. Connect negative to negative without exception.
It only takes a minute or two to set it up. First, dial in the proper voltage range. A good starting point is 30-volts. That’s often enough to trip the reset logic. With these lithium-ion battery packs, you can go up to 40 volts safely. Re-connect positive lead to the positive terminal. Connect negative to negative without exception.
At this point we see a clear reading of what voltage is being applied on the display of the power supply. In our test, it read approximately thirty-eight volts. Because most of the battery pack was asleep, very little current was being drawn.
Leave this connected for about fifteen more seconds. You’re just trying to raise the internal voltage threshold here.
At the 15 second mark, disconnect. The power supply readings drop back down naturaly and the voltage on the dead pack has risen slightly. You can check this with a multimeter. It’s reading correctly again. That tiny increase is all that it took.
The battery pack now has enough residual charge visible and registers properly on your multimeter again.
Now that it’s been reset, the rest is simple. Put the battery back on the charger as you would normally. Look out for the charging indicator lights to come on. In this case they do right away when inserted. And the pack takes a charge just fine from there. There is no more trouble.
The good news: You don’t have to purchase a brand new battery with this trick.
It also seems to work just fine for most of the Worx Share Volt systems. When voltage drops to zero, the logic board becomes confused. A small adjustment will fix your issue quickly. All that’s needed is a power supply unit or wires, no tools necessary.
Before you replace any dead pack, try this. A lot of folks throw away batteries that were just fine inside. They only need a manual reset to come back to life. It’s literaley less than two minutes total. Feels good to extend the life of your gear.
