[gangstertim]

Battery-operated household items. I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet?

Similarly: I'd love to have a little reading sconce on my wall next to my bed, but running a circuit through the existing walls without tearing them up is impossible. Why isn't there any attractive battery-powered home lighting? Sure, maybe overhead lights for lighting a room need more draw, but there's no reason to plug in a desk lamp, wall sconce, or coffee table light every day. Especially for renters who aren't about to hire an electrician—why no battery-powered lights designed for the home? Periodic recharging is annoying, but it's better than literally not being able to have a light where I want it.

There's a market here and it's not new technology. It's just repackaging existing technology with a splash of industrial design. Hell, the battery requirements for my drill are much greater than the battery requirements for my immersion blender. It shouldn't even be expensive!

[toyg]

I would hate your world of batteries-everywhere. I already loathe the fact that I need to constantly recharge my phone, my watch, my mouse, my kindle, my headphones, my camera, my doorbell, my torchlight, my tire inflator, my tv remote... some of these will be used so sparingly that the batteries might leak in the meantime, or they might just die, so now every time you want to use X you have to wait for the batteries to charge, from a few minutes to a few hours.

Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that electrical systems in buildings are still too hard to modify. As you say, you cannot really tweak much once the wall is done. In a day and age where electrical devices continue to multiply, it's sadistic to bang on about extender-cords being "fire hazards" while not providing alternatives. You don't want fire hazards? Give me a way to safely upgrade the energy distribution of my home that is as easy as plugging in an extender cord.

[HenryKissinger]

> Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that electrical systems in buildings are still too hard to modify. As you say, you cannot really tweak much once the wall is done. In a day and age where electrical devices continue to multiply, it's sadistic to bang on about extender-cords being "fire hazards" while not providing alternatives. You don't want fire hazards? Give me a way to safely upgrade the energy distribution of my home that is as easy as plugging in an extender cord.

Glad someone else is sharing my views. Burying cables into physical fixtures that cannot be accessed any other way than brute force is, I find, completely archaic. The solution is modular home design. Houses should be built more like gaming PCs in a way. Every wall would be 4-5ft thick, be mostly empty on the inside, and have a special door to allow a human to go inside. This "closet inside a wall" would contain standardized plugs/hooks/supports for electrical cables (along with plumbing and gas lines and internet fiber and any kind of wire or pipe that passes through the home). Load bearing would still be assumed by columns and other hard elements, but hidden inside these 5ft thick walls.

[starky]

I would more picture a system where you install standardized wall panels on the load bearing structure with a DIN rail like system. You buy panels that are some standard width (say 16 inches) and come in standardized heights (e.g. 2ft, 4ft, 8ft) with whatever connections running through them. If you want to re-configure your house, you just buy replacement panels.

Now I see significant technical drawbacks to such a system, but it is an interesting idea to think about and would be way more space efficient than the one you are talking about.

[TeMPOraL]

Seconded. I already told my wife that if and when we'll be moving to a country house, I want to have walls made like on starships in Star Trek - with space in the walls through which cabling runs, covered by disguised access panels that can be taken off.

(I'm not sure she fully understands how serious I'm about it, and the extent to which I want to push it. I want them across the whole wall, i.e. so I could, if need be, reroute any cabling throughought the entire floor.)

[jldugger]

It seems far more likely that you'd just install conduit correctly, and do cable routing in the attic.

[yellowapple]

I remember reading about some construction bricks with removable access panels along these same lines, but apparently I was hallucinating because I cannot for the life of me find these regardless of any combination of search terms on both DDG and Google. I also remember them still being in the design/prototype stage, so they're probably vaporware.

[zbowling]

Battery powered devices like this do better with brushless motors to save battery. Corded devices which can use a brushed motor since they can sacrifice some electrical efficiency. Good brushless isn't cheap. Fixed appliances this aren't really going to go from kitchen to kitchen like your drill either. Probably pulling it out from the counter and using it and then putting it away. Why deal with batteries?

[lock-free]

I'd guess because the market isn't really there when wire is extremely cheap and the building codes require more outlets than most people need. The wire for your sconce has already been run through the wall, it's at an outlet. Managing cables is not that hard.

Power tools are a bit different because they need to fit into any given tight space about once, and can't rely on wall power being nearby. Your sconce and kitchen appliances don't work on the same assumption.

[TeMPOraL]

> and the building codes require more outlets than most people need

Does it, though? Never in my life I've seen a house anywhere in the countries I've been to, that would have a sufficient number of outlets. Myself I think corded devices are fine, but houses come with way too few outlets.

[imgabe]

There's quite a few battery powered LED lights you can stick on the wall. Most of them are meant to go in closets or under cabinets, but there's no reason you couldn't put one next to your bed.

[_-___________-_]

My blender has a base which is attached to the wall, and a removable part where the stuff you're blending goes. What advantage would it bring me if I could move the base? It also has a 1200W motor or something similar. The batteries required to power that for any reasonable length of time would be heavy and expensive.

This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

[daniellarusso]

What about a mechanical adapter to couple the immersion blender into the deWalt chuck?

I have seen battery powered blenders, though.

[Too]

On that topic. What happened to standardized batteries, like the good old AA, AAA, etc.

Every appliance i have nowadays have their own built in proprietary lipo and even worse their own proprietary charger which adds yet another mess of cables everywhere. Why can't i take the DeWalt battery and plug into my Bosch screwdriver?

[TeMPOraL]

They're still there, but in low-end / low power draw devices. In the past two years, I went from using pretty much no batteries to having ~30 AA batteries spread around various appliances, tools and child toys. Fortunately I recognized the trend early, and bought a charger and a large supply of rechargeable AAs. Now I'm in the process of designing a battery cabinet, because keeping spares and a charger around has become a logistical challenge ;).

[Too]

It's not exactly like i miss the old days of having AA batteries being spread around and that needs replacement all the time. It's more the lack of something with equivalent modularity, but bigger and with modern higher expectations on energy, power and charging. Like what we are used seeing in laptops, power tools, e-bikes, drones, cameras, torch, appliances, etc.

[maccard]

> I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet?

My cordless dewalt drill cost more than my mixer, immersion blendar, and food processor combined.

[cmonfeat]

I understand the convenience argument, but with current battery technology this would not be sustainable. All those batteries require rare earth materials and add more waste to our daily lives as they have limited lifespans.

[arbol]

Using batteries like this sounds extremely wasteful. A lot of energy goes into extracting the lithium and it's not like they last forever.