Dyson Vacuum Battery modification / upgrade

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If you&#;re looking to replace the battery pack on your Dyson cordless vacuum, we think your best bet is to skip the knockoff packs you can find on Amazon or AliExpress, and stick with the genuine Dyson packs&#;as painfully expensive as they are.

We hired Lee Johnson, who has 10 years of experience designing and testing electronics (including a stint at NASA), to test and dismantle a few replacement battery packs for the Dyson V7. He found that although the third-party packs run the vacuum fine (at least while they&#;re new), they are &#;cheaply made battery packs&#; that &#;for sure won&#;t last as long&#; as the genuine Dyson packs&#;and probably not even long enough to make their low price worth it. More importantly, they may pose some safety risks.

When we opened up the packs, it was obvious that the knockoffs were of a much lower quality than the genuine packs.

The most important difference we found was that the knockoff packs used no-name battery cells. Or, at the very least, they weren&#;t labeled like any known cells from big-name suppliers (such as Samsung, LG, Panasonic, and Murata, among others), which do quality-control tests to make sure the cells conform to industry safety standards and perform predictably. Maybe they&#;re salvaged and relabeled (possibly damaged or depleted) cells, or they could be true counterfeits, without the same quality-control and built-in safety features as the brand-name cells.

Without getting too deep into the details of battery safety certifications and regulations, the takeaway is that lower-quality cells could cause performance problems, have shorter lifespans, or possibly pose some safety risks (the Consumer Product Safety Commission has a list of potential hazards, and The Atlantic has some horror stories). The Dyson pack, meanwhile, uses cells from Murata, a major lithium battery supplier.

The genuine Dyson battery pack uses cells from Murata, a major supplier of lithium-ion batteries.

Photo: Lee Johnson

The PowerExtra knockoff pack uses no-name cells, which have about only half the advertised capacity and may be missing certain safety features. Also note the soldering on the bottom right, which an electrical engineer described as &#;sloppy.&#;

Photo: Lee Johnson

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The genuine Dyson battery pack uses cells from Murata, a major supplier of lithium-ion batteries.

Photo: Lee Johnson

The knockoff packs aren&#;t assembled very well, either. Johnson described the soldering on one of the packs (made by PowerExtra, $35) as &#;sloppy&#; and noted that it had a ton of silicone insulation, possibly because of slapdash construction requiring extra protection against short-circuiting. &#;I&#;m sure if we were able to charge/discharge cycle this pack until death it wouldn&#;t last very long compared to the Dyson,&#; Johnson wrote in an . The other knockoff pack (by Dsanke, $35) has components that are very similar to the PowerExtra&#;s, but the assembly is a little better. The control boards on both knockoffs also have no conformal coating (a resin that keeps dust and moisture from damaging the circuits, and also makes it harder to modify or reverse-engineer the board).

Basically, the cheap packs aren&#;t likely to hold up to regular wear and tear like the genuine pack. Some Dyson packs do fail within a year (in which case they&#;re covered by the warranty), but our sense from reading Amazon reviews and talking to people who have bought knockoffs is that they often fail after just a few months.

Finally, the third-party packs are missing some of the elements that you&#;ll find on a genuine Dyson battery control board. We can&#;t tell what all of the Dyson microcontrollers do&#;we searched for part numbers printed on the Dyson components and couldn&#;t find them for sale. Our educated guess is that the knockoffs are missing some charge and discharge monitors and controllers, and a few safety monitors. When we asked Dyson for a rundown of the differences, a spokesperson gave us a vague &#;we always advise against using anything other than genuine Dyson parts,&#; and &#;third-party batteries often do not conform to safety standards and can be dangerous&#;they also often suffer from inferior performance.&#;

Performance-wise, the knockoffs were okay. We charged each pack to its full capacity. Then we hooked them up to some temperature sensors and ran them on the V7&#;s max suction setting until they were dead. The knockoff packs &#;don&#;t have an obvious deficiency&#; in this regard, Johnson said.

However, we did find that the knockoffs didn&#;t run quite as long as the genuine Dyson pack. The PowerExtra ran out of juice in a shade under 5 minutes. The Dsanke lasted about 40 seconds longer. The real Dyson pack ran for 6 minutes and 30 seconds. This is despite claims from the companies that make the knockoff batteries that their batteries have higher capacities than the Dyson pack. The PowerExtra we tested, which disappeared from Amazon before we even finished writing this article (a common issue we&#;ve seen on Amazon with knockoff and counterfeit products), claims to have a capacity of 4,000 mAh (almost twice as much as Dyson&#;s 2,100 mAh), but we found just 2,000 mAh printed on the battery cells. The other knockoff, by Dsanke, claims 3,000 mAh, but we found only 2,500 mAh.

We did find that the temperature of the third-party packs spiked and fell several times during charging, which can be a sign of lower-quality battery cells or pack design, according to Johnson. The Dyson pack did change temperatures, but it was a smooth curve.

We looked at only two of about a dozen knockoff battery packs, but considering that most knockoff battery packs have similar prices and a lack of recognizable brands attached, we&#;re pretty confident that they&#;ll all be comparably shoddy.

Are the Dyson packs overpriced and overengineered? There&#;s no doubt that they&#;re wildly expensive. And there&#;s some evidence that they fail at the same rates as battery packs from other brands (such as Shark), which almost always charge less for replacement packs. Though James Dyson once spouted off that the pack for the higher-end V10 vacuum could last for 15 years, a company spokesperson backtracked and told us that was engineer-speak, not a guarantee. (The Dyson warranty covers the battery pack for one year.)

Their price is high, but Dyson stick vacuums are the only great option we&#;ve found if you want the convenience of a cordless vacuum with enough cleaning power to basically replace a plug-in. If you need to replace the battery pack, the genuine pack seems like the safer choice (we can&#;t find any examples of battery-safety problems), and it might save you some frustration and even money over time. If a Dyson stick vac doesn&#;t seem like it&#;s worth the money, get a plug-in vacuum.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Dyson v10 Replacement Battery.