What Cells Are In A Bauker Battery?

Bauker batteries are not that well known, but if you have ever gone to ToolStation then you have probably seen the Bauker range and the Hawksmoor garden range which also use these batteries.

And they are cheap tools, so you may well have been tempted. But as we all know the batteries are often a weak point with these more affordable tool ranges. But does this hold true with the Bauker batteries? Let’s have a look and find out what cells are in this bargain battery.

So here is the battery, it has all the features of any slide-in battery including a charge percentage LED light with three different indicators. Made of hard plastic it feels robust enough, very similar to any other 18V tool battery so far.

Opening it up we get our first look at the battery and straight away I am actually very impressed. This is actually one of the best battery packs I have seen, everything is very well packaged, and more importantly, look at what we can see on one of the cells “Samsung” this is very good news.

Samsung makes some of, if not the, best 18650 lithium-ion cells available today. So to have them in a battery this cheap is great news. I think all of the big tool makers I have tested so far use Samsung cells including Makita, DeWalt, and Milwaukee.

Not all Samsung cells are the same though so we need to do a bit more digging to find out exactly what cell they are.

Before I do that let’s just have a look round the battery pack a little more. There is some really nice foam padding and insulation around the outside of the battery. This covers the end of the cells so should help insulate them against accidentally shorting, which can cause nasty fires.

The fact it is also quite spongy will add some protection against being dropped and banged around. Speaking of that this battery is really tightly packed and feels really solid, I will go as far as to say its one of the best-made battery packs I have looked at so far.

Here we have a temperature probe glued in between the cells, this will cut the battery out if it gets too hot. This is a pretty standard feature on battery packs now but it is still nice to know it is here.

After peeling off the insulation we can see the spot welding of the cells together. Again this is really high-quality spot welding.

In a lot of cheaper batteries, these can be a bit shoddy, but they look great here and it is also worth noting that nice, wide nickel strips have been used.

So in order to take this pack apart I need to desolder these tabs which connect the battery to the main board. As a side note just look at how there are three separate connections on each side of the battery.

This means there is a connection to each end of every row of batteries, this usually means the battery has load balancing, but don’t take that as gospel.

After de-soldering I still couldn’t get the pack apart and realised I would need to take apart every single spot weld to get the cells out.

So instead of that I went with the F**k it method and started breaking the plastic off.

Luckily it didn’t take too much effort to get to the cells. And now we can see they are 20R Samsung cells.

These are the exact same cells as are in the Milwaukee 4Ah battery and that battery costs 50% more for the same capacity at the time of writing! £40.80 for the Bauker and £61.18 for the Milwaukee.

Final Thoughts

This is a very good battery and has the exact same cells as Milwaukee use in their power tools (Samsung 20R). While there may be some fancy battery management that Milwaukee have and this doesn’t it is still a really good sign (this is also pure speculation and might be completely false).

The battery is incredibly well packed and feels very well made, I would have no issue recommending this battery at all.