Your leaf blower battery should be able to charge a laptop. Your drill’s battery should charge your phone. And while we’re at it, why can’t our increasingly powerful USB-C power adapters also charge those power tool batteries?
Basically, there isn’t much difference between a power tool battery you buy from Anker and a power tool battery from DeWalt – both usually contain the same 18650 Li-ion cells. But to do all of this, your power tool batteries will need a powerful USB-C port.
And it really hasn’t been a thing… until now.
The $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add this port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in literally an instant. Slide this quarter-pound adapter onto your battery and you’ve got a bi-directional 100W USB-C PD port. This means that not only can you charge up to a MacBook Pro-sized laptop with a large enough DeWalt pack, but you can also charge those DeWalt packs with your laptop or phone’s USB-C charger.
The adapter supports everything from the cheap 1.3Ah packs that come with your loss-leader combo kit to the massive 15Ah FlexVolt packs you’d probably only put in stationary tools. This is the largest gadget charging battery you can find outside of specialist power stations.
As someone with a garage drawer full of DeWalt batteries, I couldn’t wait to test it out. But it’s also not exactly the experience I dreamed of.
Good things
- Works as advertised: 100W output, 100W input
- Compact
- Built like a tank
Bad things
- Expensive – and you can only buy the full set from $99
- Not as useful with the smaller DeWalt batteries
- Sometimes it can be difficult to fully charge dead batteries
How we rate and review devices
I’ve been testing the DeWalt DCB094 on and off for months, and here’s the good news: it totally works.
I turned DeWalt’s monster 15 Ah pack into an external USB-C battery that managed to charge my wife’s 14-inch MacBook Pro (69.6 Wh) three full times and still have gas in the tank. My Steam Deck? I charged its 40.04 Wh pack five full times — that’s 10 extra hours of Elden Ring right here. When I shot a nearly three-hour timelapse Lego build with my iPhone, I plugged it into a DeWalt 6 Ah pack, knowing there was no way I’d run out of power.
You get one 100W USB-C PD port and one 12W USB-A port. The USB-A port will also do pass-through charging while charging the DeWalt battery.
Every DeWalt 20V battery I tried, new or old, big or small, worked with the adapter too. This includes my two 1.5 Ah packs, one 1.7 Ah pack, the two 5 Ah packs that came with my mower, and the two 6 Ah packs I bought about a year ago and rarely use. I found them all to charge up to 100W in both directions through that USB-C port, enough to keep today’s (but not tomorrow’s) largest USB-C PD laptops running just as plugged into the wall.
When it came time to recharge the batteries of these power tools, the 100W USB-C port sometimes let me do it faster than the DeWalt AC adapters. Although DeWalt unfortunately only ships the DCB094 with a 65W USB-C charger, even that should offer faster charging speeds than the company’s cheaper AC adapters that come with a drill or driver kit. And when I added my own separately purchased 100W USB-C charger, I was able to save time with my 4A (80W) DeWalt AC adapter when charging the largest packs.
Here’s how quickly I charged these batteries and roughly how much I got out of them:
Charging time and capacity
DeWalt Battery Battery Status 65W USB-C Charger + Adapter 100W USB-C Charger + Adapter 4A DeWalt Wall Charger (DCB115) Charging the Steam Deck from a DeWalt Battery* DeWalt Battery Battery Status 65W USB- C Charger + Adapter 100W USB-C Charger + Adapter 4A DeWalt Wall Charger (DCB115) Charging Steam Deck from DeWalt Battery* 1.5 Ah (30 Wh) Moderately used 26 minutes 27 minutes
22 minutes
21Wh (half charge) 1.7Ah (34Wh) Brand new 30 minutes 26 minutes 26 minutes 22.8Wh (half charge) 4.0Ah (80Wh) Heavy use 55 minutes 51 minutes
47 minutes
48Wh (1 charge) 5Ah (100Wh) Moderately used 1h, 29m
1h, 5m
1h, 14m 66Wh (1.5 charges) 6Ah (120Wh) Lightly used 1h, 47m
1h, 24m
1h, 29m 84Wh (2 charges) 15Ah (300Wh) Brand New 4h, 33m
3h., 14m
4h, 6m 206Wh (5 charges) *Charging larger batteries for longer may be more efficient. With a 15 Ah DeWalt battery, I saw closer to 224 Wh when charging a 69.6 Wh MacBook Pro and closer to 240 Wh when charging a 100 Wh USB-C battery.
The only problem I had was that if I completely drained the battery, and I mean completely drained it—put it all the way in a leaf blower or drilled repeatedly until it stopped spinning—sometimes the DeWalt adapter wouldn’t light up to charge when I put it in . Sometimes I had to trick it by plugging it into another battery or charger first. Oh, and you can’t charge one DeWalt battery with another DeWalt battery using two adapters. I tried.
So if pretty much everything works great, why am I giving this product a 6? Partly because The Verge just moved to a full 10-point review score scale to avoid score inflation — a 6 is still good! — but also partly because the benefits of the DeWalt adapter start to diminish when you don’t pair it with a 15Ah battery that costs $389 on its own.
Every battery I’ve tried works – even a Chinese knockoff – but not all batteries are the same. I wouldn’t bother using a small 1.5Ah battery. Nor the copies because the seller lied about its capacity.
With smaller batteries like my 1.5A, 1.7A and even 4Ah packs, they just didn’t charge the devices in need long enough to justify reaching for them instead of a traditional battery bank or charger.
Some of this is likely due to transfer losses that are not unique to DeWalt. You can’t fully charge a 100Wh laptop battery with a 100Wh battery pack like DeWalt’s DCB205 because some of that energy doesn’t get through. (Some is wasted as heat, and I can confirm that charging my 100Wh HyperJuice with the DeWalt adapter made the HyperJuice uncomfortably hot to the touch.) In general, I’ve seen losses between 20 percent and 33 percent with my gadgets—eg. The 6Ah (120Wh) DCB206 only gave me 80Wh of battery life on the Steam Deck.
You can even charge your DeWalt batteries super slowly with a 5V USB-A adapter in a pinch. This 6Ah DeWalt battery took 28.5 hours to charge. Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
But that 6 Ah battery is also a 2.5-pound brick after you add the DeWalt adapter—twice the weight of my HyperJuice, even assuming I don’t have to buy a DeWalt battery because I already have one for my tools. The DeWalt’s 5Ah battery is only slightly lighter, but then I can only be looking at 66Wh of power for my gadgets etc.
When you consider the fact that DeWalt batteries are quite expensive and heavy for the capacity they typically offer, I can’t really recommend anyone buy the DeWalt ecosystem just for this feature unless you really need rugged batteries that can charge your devices and power tools on the go.
But if you already have a garage full of large DeWalt batteries that don’t get much use? I could absolutely see spending $100 if I didn’t already have one or two powerful power banks. Between 5A charging speeds and 100W of gadget power, there’s a lot to like.
Zoom in for loading specs.
Now, though, what I really want is for DeWalt and company to take the obvious next step: stick the USB-C port on the battery itself so we don’t have to mess around with adapters at all. In January, DeWalt product manager Sean Fitzgibbons told me that the DCB094 could be a bit of a test bubble: “If we get the interest that I expect we’ll get, I think that will open a lot more doors for potentially adding this directly to batteries down the road.” ”
I think DeWalt should just do it. Many people would buy a USB-C…
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