DeWalt USB-C Charging Kit review: your power tool battery can charge gadgets now

Your leaf blower battery should be able to charge a laptop. Your drill battery should charge your phone. And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t our ever-more powerful USB-C power adapters be able to charge those power tool batteries as well?

Fundamentally, there’s not much difference between a battery bank you buy from Anker and a power tool battery from DeWalt — both generally contain the same 18650 lithium-ion cells. But to do all that, your power tool batteries would need a powerful USB-C port.

And that hasn’t really been a thing… till now.

The $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add that port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in a literal snap. Slide this quarter-pound adapter onto your battery pack, and you get a bi-directional 100W USB-C PD port. That means not only can you charge up to a MacBook Pro-sized laptop with a big enough DeWalt pack, you can charge those DeWalt packs with your laptop or phone’s USB-C charger as well.

The adapter supports everything from the cheap 1.3Ah packs that came with your loss-leader combo kit to the massive 15Ah FlexVolt packs you’d probably only stick in stationary tools. It’s the biggest gadget charging battery you’re liable to find outside of dedicated power stations.

As someone with a garage drawer full of DeWalt batteries, I couldn’t wait to put it to the test. But it’s also not quite the experience I was dreaming of.

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I’ve been testing the DeWalt DCB094 on and off for months, and here’s the good news: it totally works.

I turned DeWalt’s monster 15Ah pack into a USB-C external battery that was able to charge my wife’s 14-inch MacBook Pro (69.6Wh) three full times and still had gas in the tank. My Steam Deck? I charged up its 40.04Wh pack five full times — that’s 10 extra hours of Elden Ring right there. When I filmed a nearly three-hour timelapse Lego build with my iPhone, I plugged it into a 6Ah DeWalt pack knowing there was no way I’d run out of juice.

Every DeWalt 20V battery I tried, new or old, large or small, worked with the adapter, too. That includes my two 1.5Ah packs, one 1.7Ah pack, the two 5Ah packs that came with my lawnmower, and the two 6Ah packs I bought about a year ago and rarely use. I clocked them all charging up to 100W in both directions over that USB-C port, enough to keep today’s (but not tomorrow’s) biggest USB-C PD laptops running just like they were plugged into the wall.

When it came time to recharge those power tool batteries, the 100W USB-C port sometimes let me do it faster than DeWalt’s AC adapters, too. 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 off time over my 4A (80W) DeWalt AC adapter when charging the very biggest packs.

Here’s how fast I got these batteries to charge and roughly how much I got out of them: