"Is this one ours?" Tessa held up her phone with a cordless glue gun in a shopping cart. She was making table numbers for the wedding, and the corded glue gun in the junk drawer had died with a sad little pop. I looked at the battery on the listing, and it wasn't ours. It was a third brand.
We have a rule in this house, and it's a very boring one: DeWalt in the shop, EGO in the yard, and nothing else with a battery. I didn't expect the first real test of it to be a glue gun.
How we ended up with two
The DeWalt side happened first, and somewhat by accident. I bought a 20V MAX drill and impact driver kit on Black Friday in 2023, before we even had a house, because it was a good deal and I was tired of borrowing my dad's. That kit came with two batteries and a charger, and once you own batteries, every future drill aisle looks different.
The EGO side came in May 2024, a month after we closed, when we needed a mower. I wanted a battery mower so I wasn't storing gas cans in a 1952 wooden garage and yanking a pull cord on Saturday mornings. EGO's 56V mower was the one I kept coming back to: quiet, powerful enough for our small lawn and easy to start. Later that year I bought the EGO string trimmer as a bare tool, no battery, and it runs on the mower's battery.
Could I have gone all DeWalt and bought their mower? Probably. I just liked the EGO mower more, and I made peace with having two platforms. The way I justify it is that they live in different places. The yard tools and their charger hang on the left wall of the garage. The shop tools sit on a shelf near the door until I finally build a proper workbench, which is next month's project.
What the rule saves
The expensive part of a cordless tool is usually the battery. Once you have a couple, you can buy new tools bare, without a battery or charger, and the price drops a lot. That's the whole trick. The more tools share a battery, the cheaper each new one gets.
It also saves clutter. One drawer of DeWalt batteries, one shelf of EGO batteries, two chargers. No orphan charger in a box whose tool I can't find.
In my day job, every extra SKU costs you something even when it's just sitting on a shelf: space, tracking, things that expire. A third battery platform would be a third SKU family in a one-car garage.
I keep a wish list in the house sheet with the tool, the bare-tool price I'm willing to pay and the project it's for. Right now the top two lines are a DeWalt circular saw for the workbench and, eventually, an EGO leaf blower before the maple drops its leaves in the fall. I watch for sales around holidays, especially when a bare tool comes with a free battery, which is the closest thing to free money in this hobby.
The glue gun, and the rule's escape hatch
Back to Tessa. The cordless glue gun she liked used a battery we don't own and would never use for anything else. Buying it meant a new battery, a new charger and a third platform in the house, all so she could make thirty table numbers and some centerpieces.
So we went to Menards and bought a new corded glue gun for less than twenty dollars. She took it from me in the parking lot, looked at the cord for a long moment and said, "I'm putting this in my vows." I'm fairly sure she's joking.
That's the escape hatch in our rule: corded tools don't count. Gary's miter saw, the Harbor Freight sander still in its box and Tessa's glue gun all plug into the wall and don't need to match anything. When a tool is used twice a year, a cord is fine. Gary has run his whole garage on cords for forty years, and he thinks my battery rule is a reasonable way to avoid a very expensive drawer.
I nearly broke the rule myself in June, for the record. Someone on Marketplace was selling an off-brand oscillating multi-tool with two batteries for $25. I drove over, sat in the truck in front of the seller's house for a minute and drove home. If I need one, I'll wait for the DeWalt to go on sale bare.
Moose doesn't care about any of this. The only tool in the garage he has an opinion on is the shop vac, which plugs into the wall and is, in his view, the most dangerous thing we own.
