hbpowerwall said:
I feed duped - yeh sure I got a bunch of good cells but I've I'VE ripped you guys off by false advertising
I don't think that anyone feels ripped off. Well, certainly I don't. It's not your fault if someone else decides to be potentially dishonest.
At the moment I'm about to buy some Ryobi tools for the first time, just because they have some interesting tools that no one else makes. Especially the battery powered hot glue gun is what I'm interested in.
Anyway, so I also checked for the batteries and the original 5.0Ah battery is a whopping 105 EUR (122 USD / 165 AUD) on Amazon at the moment. And there are three different sellers each selling slightly different "replacement batteries" between 32 and 40 EUR per piece. So there is even some competition in the market. And the reviews are mixed, as expected.
The good ratings are split into two groups. Some customers are satisfied and leave favorable reviews without giving any details. Some give good ratings and tell about their usage and almost always you'll find that these are low power applications like running some lights, the fan or a drill.
And the bad reviews are basically split into two groups as well. Some are unhappy about the longevity and report a lifetime of some days or some cycles up to 6 months at best. And the other group complains about their tools not working properly and these are almost exclusively high drain applications like using an angle grinder.
No one opened the battery to check the individual cells but I didn't expect that anyway. 99% of all customers can't or won't do that.
It's interesting to see that the cheapest of the three products is rated a bit worse, on average, than the other two. But generally all three have the same issues. And this is perfectly fitting in my opinion. The cheap cells, if they survive, run low power tools perfectly and give up on the high power tools. I'd think it's the same for the Vanon batteries.
So, a bit of a "No shit, Sherlock?" moment here I guess. Nothing really surprising. If you only need little power then you might get away with a cheap knockoff, otherwise get the real stuff.
Not sure about the relevance of these "findings" for the situation at hand now that I finished wrinting it down, but oh well