The DeWalt charger in the garage blinked at me for twenty minutes last Sunday and refused to charge anything. It was 15 degrees outside and maybe 18 in the garage. I unplugged it, plugged it back in, tried a different battery, and finally read the label on the charger, which explained that the blinking pattern meant "hot/cold pack delay." The battery was too cold to charge, and the charger was protecting it from me.
That was the end of my tools living in the garage in winter.
The batteries come inside
We run two battery platforms: DeWalt 20V in the shop (the drill and impact from 2023, plus the circular saw I bought in August) and EGO 56V in the yard (the mower, string trimmer and the leaf blower I added in October). As of last weekend, every one of those batteries lives in a plastic tote on a shelf in the basement, where it stays around 60 degrees.
The EGO batteries won't see use until April, so they're stored at about half charge, which is what the manual recommends for long storage. The DeWalt chargers moved downstairs too. One fully charged DeWalt battery lives on a hook by the side door, on the landing between the basement and kitchen stairs, so I can grab it on the way out to the garage. It's my safety stock: one battery always ready, and the rest charging inside.
The other thing I learned is that cold batteries lie. A pack that's been sitting in the garage at 15 degrees will show two bars and then quit after a few screws. Bring the same battery inside for an hour and it's back to full. It wasn't dead, just cold. Last winter I thought one of my DeWalt batteries was failing. It was fine. I was keeping it in a freezer.
What stays out there all winter
Not everything needs to move. These stay in the garage:
- The workbench I built in August, the circular saw and drill bodies (no batteries) and the hand tools in their wall cabinet.
- The snowblower, which is gas with an electric start that runs off an extension cord, not a battery.
- The ladders, the shovels, the roof rake and the bare EGO tools.
- A gas can with stabilizer in it.
- Tessa's Civic, which takes up most of the floor now and gets priority.
The hand tools get one extra step. Last spring my chisels and a couple of wrenches came out of winter with orange freckles, from the garage warming up on sunny days and the moisture settling on cold steel. This year I wiped everything with an oily rag before December. If I bring a cold tool into the warm basement, it goes in a closed tote to warm up slowly instead of sweating on the shelf.
Glue, caulk and the paint I ruined
The expensive lesson from last winter was liquids. I left a half-full gallon of Behr interior paint in the garage, and in March it had the texture of cottage cheese. A tube of caulk came out lumpy, and a bottle of wood glue had gone chalky and wouldn't stick. None of it was expensive on its own, but together it was maybe forty dollars of stuff I had to buy again.
Now every liquid lives in a bin on a basement shelf: paint, wood glue, caulk, construction adhesive and the leftover can of spray foam from the rim joists in October. Most wood glue labels want 50 degrees or warmer to cure properly anyway, so glue-ups moved inside too. The small shelf I'm building for my mom for Christmas got glued and clamped on a folding table next to the furnace last weekend, with Moose lying under it like he was guarding evidence.
Building things on a folding table next to the furnace is not a long-term plan. A real workspace in the basement is on the list for after the holidays. Gary heats his garage, which is part of why it's the neighborhood tool library in winter. Ours is, as Tessa puts it, "the snowblower's bedroom."
She also reminded me, while I was moving the batteries inside, that she's still bitter about the glue gun. She wanted a cordless one last summer, and I said no third battery platform, so she got a corded one. "Mine works at any temperature," she said. She's right, and I'm not going to tell her so in writing. Except I just did.
