Metabo is a brand we’re familiar with but don’t see all that often. There’s a reason for that. Their distribution isn’t through the home improvement warehouse stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot. Instead, Metabo is sold primarily at the local supply store level, at lumber yards, and at local hardware stores. The company is known for putting out some seriously heavy-duty tools and sticking by them. Their angle grinders, for example, are notorious for setting industry standards that others try to meet or exceed. Cordless, however, is something that we didn’t think Metabo would be a market leader on, though they have a wide assortment of tools. Until now. Now, we have a Metabo 4Ah 18V battery pack on the market.
Metabo 4Ah 18V Battery Pack
The Metabo 4Ah 18V battery pack delivers 4 amp-hours of energy for running power tools. Currently, you can expect anywhere from 2.6Ah – 3.0Ah on an extended-run 18V Li-ion battery, even the newest models from Milwaukee, DeWalt, Bosch and Ridgid. Metabo is claiming it’s new batteries will deliver 4Ah.
That would equate to a new level of run-time, approximately 33% more, in fact, than today’s market-leading 3.0Ah models.
If this is legit, and Metabo’s new air-cooled batteries aren’t just figuring a new way to calculate Ah (or worse, perform trade-offs to hit the new metric) then we could have just entered the latest round of updates that will bring us to the next level of cordless tool performance – namely run-time. If there is anything that brings down the attractiveness of a cordless product, it’s limited run-time.
Final Thoughts
Torque, speed, and power are beginning to rival corded alternatives – on some tools at least, but having to swap out batteries every 8-10 minutes can be a chore if you’ve got tons of work to do. It also wears out the batteries faster. Each time you charge a battery, even a newer Lithium-ion model, you take away part of its life. Longer periods between charging mean that you get to use the tool longer and you get to get practical use of the battery longer as well.
The Metabo 4Ah 18V battery pack is part of the company’s “Power Extreme” range. The batteries are also fully backward-compatible, as you’d expect, so anyone who has the older 18V system will be good to go. Presumably, there will be a new charger for the newer batteries, but it will be compatible with the current line of 18V Li-ion packs as well.
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