Battery Charging Station Ideas

I'm building a mounted power "strip" for one of my workbenches out of a 6-gang metal wall box. Will have three heavy-duty duplex recepticals, one 30W USB-C PD receptical, and an inexpensive power meter that will tell me things like voltage, current, watts, watt-hours, PF, etc. Next to that I'm going to wall-mount a Dewalt and a Milwaukee charger and they'll more or less permanently occupy one of the recepticals, leaving the other six spots for other chargers, smaller corded power tools, etc.

If you're not as inclined as I am, just get a good powerstrip, wall-mount chargers or build a shelf with rails to hold the tool chargers in place, zip-tie the cords to keep stuff neat and out of the way.

I got a mountable rack for the garage that you can stack all the battery pack chargers on the top shelf, middle shelf holds drill bits and such then the bottom is all slide racks for drills, staple gun, air pumps etc

Mounted a piece of plywood in the garage.

Mounted heavy duty power strip connected via smart power monitor to plywood.

Screwed my 3 chargers for my power tools to the plywood, added a couple USB pd chargers, and built a little shelf under it to hold anything that didn't have a keyhole mount.

All my batteries, chargers, in one spot taking up about 2'x2'. It's stupid simple. Yet very effective.

Even got it setup to turn off when no one is home, don't need a battery fire.

nice
how big of a circuit do you have that wired to? Standard 20a?

A 20A circuit that only has one other outlet on it once it's finished but eventually it will go on a dedicated 20A circuit, but that's a ways down the road. I'll never put that many chargers on it, probably just a 6-amp Dewalt and a M18/M12 rapid charger will stay plugged in and I'll put chargers for Ridgid, Hitachi, Dremel, Paslode, Echo, etc. on as needed. Occasionally a vehicle battery charger and any of numerous other small chargers I have. Eventually want to build a spot-welding station on the bench this will be over, I've got some things that batteries are no longer available for so I'd like to build my own. I built an earlier verson of one of these (it's what this one is plugged into in the picture) that's basically just a short heavy-duty extension cord, mainly use it just to test various tools and appliances to see live power usage.

It's mainly useful for seeing how many Watt-hours are delivered to a given battery, one of my 3-Ah Dewalt batteries now only takes in about 11 Wh before the charger reports it's fully charged, definitely no longer a healthy battery so it got put aside until I get around to replacing its cells. I've got a good stock of new lithium cells, main problem is finding nickel strips of the right thickness and then getting a spot welder. And time...

Interesting…so you can see the decline in battery performance through the charging!

I would be curious to see how much total energy it takes to charge a battery vs. how much you can actually get out of that battery. I guess that would be a kind of effeciency calculation

I added something like this to my charging station, you hear stories of people leaving charges with lithium ion batteries plugged in too long and fires starting. I'm sure it's rare but I know how forgetful I am to go back and unplug chargers, so adding a timer gives me a piece of mind that i'm limiting the fire risk in my shop.

LINK

Not really neccessary with lithium batteries, the self-discharge rate is pretty small. Most power tool chargers will switch to a maintenance mode and keep the batteries charged so there is no issue from keeping them on the charger if you are using them regularly. Most lithium battery fires are the result of human error or people buying fake/knock-off batteries that don't have the proper BMS to control how the battery is discharged or charged.