I have been collecting tools all my life. Here, on an isolated island, having a good collection of tools is more important than ever. I have tools that I inherited from my grandfather. I have a set of tools that I bought when I was first on my own (one of those 225-piece toolsets including 75 hacksaw blades). I have tools that I bought to replace the cheap tools from the set when they broke. I have tools that I bought for a specific purpose. I’m a hobbyist, though, not a professional. I’ve never had the opportunity to outfit an entire shop from scratch and make everything match. Fortunately, for the most part, tools from different manufacturers are interoperable.
For the most part.
Over the last decade or so, many of the powered tools I’ve purchased have been of the cordless variety, made possible by advances in battery technology. They’re useful and flexible in ways I had only dreamed of. But I didn’t buy a set or invest in an ecosystem. I bought the tools individually, when I needed them or found a particularly good price. And…
Every. Single. One. had its own, unique battery pack and charging system. Even sticking with the same brand doesn’t help: I have DeWalt tools that have two completely different battery/charging systems.
I kept the ever-growing collection of chargers on a shelf in our garage on the mainland, but it was a pain in the butt to use them. When we got to the island, there wasn’t a shelf available and so they all ended up in a big box that I’d have to rummage through to find the charger that fit the battery that fit the tool that I’d been using. The cords would all get tangled. Sometimes I’d go through the whole box and miss the charger I needed, because there are some charger/battery combinations that look impossible until you actually start fitting bits together.
I was lamenting the difficulty of organizing them. The chargers vary widely in size, and their size bears little relationship to the size of the batteries which in turn are only vaguely related to the size of the tool. Many are the same color, even if they’re different brands. Sometimes the color of the charger doesn’t match the tool. And even if I came up with a careful, clever way to organize them, it would likely all fall apart the next time I bought a new tool with yet-another-battery-style requiring yet another randomly shaped, styled, and colored charger.
Holly Ann said “my dad has this wall of the garage with holes in it that you can stick various hangers and clips into.” Ah, yes, a pegboard! I hadn’t considered that. So on our next trip into the big city we scored a 2’ x 4’ piece of pegboard, and I found an assortment of pegboard hooks online, and the Chargearium was born.
All our existing chargers fit (fourteen!) and their cords hang neatly down and are untangled. There is room to grow when I add new tools. I’ve mounted a power strip below it so that one need only identify the correct charger, mount the battery, and plug it in. It’s a bad idea to leave the batteries plugged in after they’re charged, so the battery goes back in the tool and the charger gets unplugged as soon as charging is complete.
This will have to do unless and until chargers and batteries get standardized and interoperable.
Will organization finally win out of chaos?
—2p