Basically, there isn’t much difference between a battery bank you buy from Anker and a power tool battery from DeWalt — both generally contain the same 18650 Li-ion cells. But to do all of this, your power tool batteries they would need a powerful USB-C port. And that wasn’t really a thing… until now. The $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add this port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in a literal snap. Slide this quarter-pound adapter over your battery and you’ve got a two-way USB-C PD 100W port. This means that not only can you charge up to a MacBook Pro-sized laptop with a fairly large DeWalt pack, but you can also charge those DeWalt packs with your laptop or phone’s USB-C charger. The adapter supports everything from the cheap 1.3Ah packs that come with the loss-leader combo kit to the huge FlexVolt 15Ah packs you’d probably only stick to fixed gear. It’s the biggest gadget charging battery you can find outside of dedicated power stations. As someone with a garage drawer full of DeWalt batteries, I was eager to try it out. But it’s not the experience I dreamed of either.

Good stuff

Works as advertised: 100W output, 100W input Compact Built like a tank

Bad things

Expensive — and you can only buy the complete $99 kit Not as useful with smaller DeWalt batteries It can sometimes struggle to charge fully discharged batteries

How we rate and evaluate devices I’ve been testing the DeWalt DCB094 on and off for months now, and here’s the good news: it works perfectly. I turned DeWalt’s 15Ah monster pack into an external USB-C battery that could charge my wife’s 14-inch (69.6 Wh) MacBook Pro three times and still have gas in the tank. My Steam Deck? I charged the 40.04Wh pack five full times — that’s an extra 10 hours of Elden Ring there. When I shot a nearly three-hour timelapse of a Lego build with my iPhone, I plugged it into a DeWalt 6Ah pack knowing there was no way I’d run out of juice. You get one USB-C PD 100W port and one USB-A 12W port. The USB-A port will pass-through charge while you’re also charging the DeWalt battery. Every DeWalt 20V battery I tried, new or old, big or small, worked with the adapter too. This includes the two 1.5 Ah packs, one 1.7 Ah pack, the two 5 Ah packs that came with my lawnmower, and the two 6 Ah packs that I bought about a year ago and rarely use. I timed them all charging up to 100W in both directions through that USB-C port, enough to keep today’s (but not tomorrow’s) larger USB-C PD laptops running just as they were plugged into the wall. When it’s time to recharge those power tool batteries, the 100W USB-C port sometimes lets me do it faster than DeWalt’s AC adapters. While DeWalt unfortunately only ships the DCB094 with a 65W USB-C charger, even that should offer a faster charging rate than the company’s cheaper AC adapters that come with drill or driver kits. And when I added my own separately purchased 100W USB-C charger, I was able to shave time off the DeWalt 4A (80W) AC adapter when charging the much larger packs. Check out how quickly I charged these batteries and roughly how much I got out of them:

Charging times and capacities

DeWalt Battery Battery Status 65W USB-C Charger + Adapter 100W USB-C Charger + Adapter 4A DeWalt Wall Charger (DCB115) DeWalt Battery Steam Deck Charging* DeWalt Battery Battery Status 65W USB-C Charger + Adapter 100W USB-C Charger + Adapter DeWalt 4A Wall Charger (DCB115) Charge Steam Deck from DeWalt Battery* 1.5Ah (30Wh) Moderate Use 26 mins 27 mins 22 minutes 21 Wh (half charge) 1.7 Ah (34 Wh) Brand new 30 min 26 min 26 min 22.8 Wh (half charge) 4.0 Ah (80 Wh) Heavily used 55 min 51 min 47 minutes 48Wh (1 charge) 5Ah (100Wh) Moderate use 1h, 29m 1 hour, 5 m 1h, 14m 66Wh (1.5 charges) 6Ah (120Wh) Lightly used 1h, 47m 1 hour, 24 m 1h, 29m 84Wh (2 charges) 15Ah (300Wh) Brand New 4h, 33m 3h, 14m 4h, 6m 206Wh (5 charges) *Charging larger batteries for longer may be more efficient. With a DeWalt 15 Ah battery, I saw closer to 224 Wh charging a 69.6 Wh MacBook Pro and closer to 240 Wh charging a 100 Wh USB-C battery bank. The only problem I had was that if I completely drained a battery, and I mean completely drained it – I ran it all the way with a leaf blower or drill repeatedly until it wouldn’t spin anymore – sometimes the DeWalt adapter wouldn’t turn on to charge when I popped it. Sometimes I had to trick it by connecting it to a different battery or charger first. So if everything works so beautifully, why am I giving this product a 6? Partly because The Verge just moved to a full 10-point scale for review scores to avoid score inflation — a 6 is still good! — but also partly because the DeWalt adapter’s merits begin to diminish when you don’t pair it with a 15 Ah battery that costs $389 on its own. Every battery I’ve tried works – even a Chinese knockoff – but not all batteries are created equal. I wouldn’t bother using a tiny 1.5Ah battery. Neither is the knockoff, because the seller lied about its ability. With smaller batteries like my 1.5A, 1.7A and even 4Ah packs, they just didn’t charge the devices they needed long enough to justify trying to access them via a traditional battery bank or charger. Part of this is likely due to carryover losses, which are not unique to DeWalt. You can’t fully charge a 100Wh laptop battery with a 100Wh battery like DeWalt’s DCB205 because some of that energy doesn’t get through. (Some is wasted as heat, and I can attest that charging the 100 Wh HyperJuice with the DeWalt adapter made the HyperJuice uncomfortably hot to the touch.) Generally, I’ve seen between 20 percent and 33 percent losses with my gadgets—for example , the 6Ah (120Wh) DCB206 only gave me 80Wh of Steam Deck battery life. You can even charge your DeWalt batteries very slowly with a USB-A 5V adapter in a pinch. It took 28.5 hours to charge this DeWalt 6 Ah battery. Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge But that 6 Ah battery is also a 2.5-pound brick once you add the DeWalt adapter — double the weight of my HyperJuice, even assuming I don’t need to buy the DeWalt battery because I already have one for my tools. The DeWalt’s 5Ah battery is a bit lighter, but then I might only be looking at 66Wh of power for my gadgets and such. Considering the fact that DeWalt batteries are quite expensive and heavy for the capacity they typically offer, I can’t really recommend buying into the DeWalt ecosystem for this feature alone, unless you really need durable batteries that can charge your devices and power tools on the go.
But if you already have a garage full of large DeWalt batteries that don’t get much use? I could see myself spending $100 if I didn’t already have a capable power bank or two. Between the 5A charging speeds and the 100W gadget output, there’s a lot to like. Zoom in on charging specs. Now, though, what I really want is for DeWalt and company to take the obvious next step: stick the USB-C port into the battery itself so we don’t have to mess with adapters at all. In January, DeWalt product manager Sean Fitzgibbons told me that the DCB094 could be a bit of a trial balloon: “If we get the interest that I expect we will, I think that would open the door a lot more to potentially adding this directly to the batteries on the road”. I think DeWalt should do it. Many people would buy a native USB-C power tool battery and never consider a $100 adapter that you have to plug in and take out every time.