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Hi, my old electric drill finally died so got a new drill for my grain mill. My research and found people are using 18V cordless drills for milling and I found a 20V lithym compact dewalt cordless yesterday. The fully charged battery dies before I finish milling 4 to 5 kg of malt??? I have to use the spare battery to finish milling. I am running the drill for roughly 4 minutes at low RPM. There are no RPM adjustments on the drill so I just squeeze lightly. Have I bought the wrong drill?

I'm not too familiar with the different specs on drills, however the drill I have will mill 30lbs of grain with 1 battery. This is the drill I have:

http://www.boschtools.com/Products/Tool ... =ddb181-02" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jimmy wrote:I'm not too familiar with the different specs on drills, however the drill I have will mill 30lbs of grain with 1 battery. This is the drill I have:

http://www.boschtools.com/Products/Tool ... =ddb181-02" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I have the same drill. Chewed through 60lbs on my mill 1 battery. However used Mike's monster mill and it took 3 batteries to power through the grain.

I just looked at dewalt's site and they don't have a 20v drill without the speed adjustment. Is it possible you bought an impact driver by accident? A driver would die pretty quickly if it was just spinning.

If you didn't, the 20v batteries come in 1.5amp standard but you can buy 3 and 4.5 amp batteries that will last much longer on a charge. For comparison I did a 15kg grain bill and a 6 kg grain bill on the same charge with my dewalt 20v 1.5amp drill.

First, thanks for all the responses so quickly. Much appreciated from a rookie. This is the drill I got:

http://www.dewalt.com/tools/20v-max-dri ... 771c2.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

No, it is not an impact drill. It is supposed to run 0-450 & 1500RPM and my mill recommends 300 RPM or so. Things went great till the battery calved 3/4 of the way through my last two batches.

I have the same drill, i can do a full bag without issue!

when you mill, are you running wide open mid or slow?

I have the same drill and I run it about half open on the low speed setting. No issues with the battery. Are you charging overnight at room temperature? Too cold can permanently hurt the battery. If you were closer I would suggest borrowing one of my batteries and seeing if it makes a difference.

thanks, room temperature charging, low speed. I will contact dewalt and see what they think.

I took the drill back and got a new one. It works great so far. Dewalt say the old one had bad batteries. Thanks for all the help.

joe_r_harvie wrote:I took the drill back and got a new one. It works great so far. Dewalt say the old one had bad batteries. Thanks for all the help.

Glad to hear it worked out.