Typically a dead battery is an inconvenience. One day my Worx 56V pack refused to charge, and the charger sat unused because it couldn’t detect the battery.
That’s what happens with cells that get down to a really low voltage point where the internal protection circuit shuts off charging for safety. But why would the pack simply turn itself totally dead? I knew there must be some way to wake it up.
Understanding the Low Voltage Lock Mechanism
So what’s wrong? The problem is recognition; the charger has to detect a certain minimum voltage before engaging with the battery. When you leave the pack idle for too long, its voltage will fall below that level which prevents the charger from “seeing” the battery.
A deeply discharged battery can’t be charged directly; it just sits there doing absolutely nothing no matter how long you wait. It needs a bit of an outside kick.
A frequent fix is to borrow a healthy unit, and any compatible 56V battery will do job of the donor. This simply means plugging the good pack into the dead one long enough to transfer sufficient energy to raise the voltage back over the cutoff point.
That in turn cause the cells to awaken from their deep sleep state making it really just a matter of jump starting them. I know that worked well on mine.
You can also try another set of the same or similar specs from another manufacturer (I’ve tried it on EGO 56V batteries). Because they are all compatible in terms of voltage, you can safely move the charge from one battery to another and use it to reset your Worx pack.
And it will work… It’s basically just filling the void between the charger and the dead cells. I even tried it on an EGO 2.0 Ah battery. It had surprisingly good performance for such a mismatch.
You should also pay close attention to polarity, making sure positive connects to the positive terminal at all times. The two negatives is never connected together…ever. That’s a quick ticket to fire or damaged components.
Initially, I simply bridged the units with some wire and clamped it down by hand. It only has a small window for transferring so stability is most important.
The other important part of that sentence is “for about 15 seconds.” That will be long enough to raise the voltage to the point where the charger recognizes there’s something connected but not so long as to overload and unnecessarily stress the donor battery. Usually, it only takes 15 seconds or less for the donation to kick off.
Once connected briefly, you unplug everything again quickly and remove wires from each battery pack. Put the donor battery away where it can’t cause any problems and now we have dead Worx pack to test.
Hopefully it will be at a little bit higher voltage than previously. We wouldn’t of wanted to charge it completely yet but just get it up a little bit.
Once you’ve done all of that, you’ll want to get your pack back to the charger by plugging it back in its home station. This means it will be recognized again and the charge indicator lights starts flashing or going solid (to let you know it knows).
From there on out it’s just business as usual with the charger accepting the battery as good and charging away. It was a little win.
Low voltage locks are a feature of lithium-ion battery systems. These work well to prevent unsafe charging situations, but when they engage, the battery is no longer usable until manually reset.
If performed properly, that reset can bring the battery back to life… And this is the basis for most reset techniques on batteries in general. I got my tool going with first attempt.
It’s simple enough to do when you get the hang of how it works and honestly you don’t even need any special gear for this. Some wire connectors and a second battery is all that’s required.
Patience will prevent rushing through making the connections. And safety is always important in every step of the process as we don’t want to short out either battery which would damage them both. It is an easy solution to a common issue that’s well worth saving a good pack over.
