Can You Use A DeWalt Battery On A Dyson Vacuum Cleaner?

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Dyson vacuum cleaners are like the home cleaning appliance equivalent of a Rolls-Royce car. They're top of the line, both in features and pricing, though they're generally reliable enough to warrant the substantial investment. Unfortunately, even though they are fancy, Dyson vacuums are vulnerable to component failure. Specifically, your Dyson battery pack could stop charging, or fail in some other way. Getting a replacement battery is an oddly circuitous process, as Dyson sells official replacements only on its website.

If you're looking for a relatively simpler replacement for a Dyson battery, you might think of using a rechargeable battery pack from a hardware brand like DeWalt. While DeWalt's battery packs aren't exactly cheaper than Dyson's, if you've already got one lying around in your garage that's not spoken for, it would certainly be easier than going through Dyson's battery replacement process.

Unfortunately, like many easy solutions, it's too good to be true; while DeWalt and Dyson batteries are similar in principle, their physical connections are completely different, preventing them from being used outside their respective systems. There are technical ways to overcome this difference, like adapters, but these third-party products present their own risks.

In very broad terms, DeWalt and Dyson rechargeable batteries are conceptually similar. They both contain banks of rechargeable power cells, and they both deliver power to an attached tool. However, this broad description is where the similarities between these two brands end. They may both be batteries, but the ways they deliver and regulate power, and most importantly, connect to their respective tools, are wholly different.

DeWalt batteries have flat tops with six connecting terminals and a locking latch. To attach one to a DeWalt tool, you slide the battery onto the tool's receiver via the connecting rails and lock it into place. A Dyson battery, on the other hand, uses a vertical stalk-like connector on top of its power bank. This stalk inserts directly into the handle of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, connecting with the vacuum's trigger. This is a deliberate design choice to ensure power only flows from the battery when the trigger is held.

Due to the different shapes between DeWalt and Dyson batteries, there is no way to directly plug a DeWalt battery into a Dyson vacuum. Even if you somehow could, DeWalt batteries only recognize DeWalt tools, so they wouldn't deliver any power anyway.

Because Dyson is such a pricey brand, there's quite a bit of interest from third parties to develop cheaper, knock-off components for it. If you searched Dyson batteries on Amazon, for example, you'd find quite a few batteries, but none of them would be official Dyson products. In a similar vein, those who really want to connect their DeWalt batteries to their Dyson vacuums have developed unofficial battery adapters, which snap onto the top of a DeWalt battery and plug into a Dyson vacuum's handle slot.

While this sounds like the ideal loophole solution, there are a few big problems. Firstly, when you plug a battery adapter into any kind of tool or device, including a Dyson vacuum, you're bypassing the battery's built-in protection systems. DeWalt batteries are equipped with circuit boards that carefully regulate power delivery to keep it safe. An adapter ignores that circuit board and forcefully squeezes power out into the attached device. This can result in either underpowered performance or overpowered performance, the latter of which can end up burning out your Dyson's motor entirely.

That brings us to the second problem, warranties. Dyson stresses on its battery care FAQ that only genuine Dyson batteries should be used with its vacuums, as that's the best way to ensure the device's health and avoid voiding the warranty. If your vacuum breaks while using an adapter, that's technically a third-party modification, which means neither Dyson nor DeWalt will show you any sympathy. If your Dyson battery goes belly-up, your only real options are to get a genuine replacement or perhaps consider a cheaper alternative to cordless Dyson vacuums.