1202 ALARM

I have a couple of 20 LED solar strings in the tiki bar at the back of the house. After a couple of years outside the strings weren't working so well and opening up one of the solar panel units I found the AAA NiCd cell inside was only holding 0.5 volts instead of 1.2 volts when fully charged. Initially I went to a few shops looking for direct replacement strings but couldn't find any. Then in Home Bargains I found 50 mini LED strings with larger solar panels and a lithium-ion battery for only £3. So I bought 2 of these and chopped off the LED strings as I was only interested in the solar panel units. An initial test with just twist-and-tape wiring proved this upgrade would work. The next step was to take the solar panel units apart and solder the wiring for my LED strings in properly. I decided to mount the solar panel units under the composite roof to keep them dry so that hopefully they will last a few years longer than the ori...

Another garden power tool converted to run on Parkside/Lidl 20v lithium-ion batteries. This is a nice brush cutter from Ozito which had seen good service on an allotment, but had a failed 18v battery pack. I took the same approach as with the Bosch conversion and gutted the cells out of the battery pack and attached a Parkside adaptor plate. Interestingly, of the 5 cells (18650) in the Ozito battery pack, 4 are serviceable and only 1 had failed, just the same as the laptop batteries. It is working well and I still have 2 adaptor plates from my last AliExpress order for more shenanigans.

A few months ago I bought a mini electric chainsaw from Lidl to cut up wood for the stove. Going by the reduced gas bills I think the chainsaw has almost paid for itself. The chainsaw uses the Parkside 20-volt lithium-ion batteries and I bought a 4Ah battery and charger to run it. Since then I have bought a couple of other Parkside gardening tools and a larger 8Ah battery which was on offer. In all I've spent about £60 on the batteries so I want to get maximum use out of them. Now over the last few years I've acquired free or for a couple of quid, several Bosch drills. These are the last of the tools that used NiCad battery packs. The big SDS hammer drill above came with two 24-volt NiCad battery packs, one completely dead and the other almost dead. I bought a couple of 18-volt NiCad packs to run this and a smaller Bosch drill and they have been really useful, especially last summer when I was working on improving the patio lean-to. So could the Bosch dr...