Visiting the annual Bosch power tool roll-out, held last week in Las Vegas, a section was devoted to hands on demonstrations of the wireless battery charging system introduced in the fall.

On my way over to this wireless charging section I had thoughts of space aged futuristic devices. What I saw really let me down. It looks like a standard charger, the only difference being that instead of having to turn the battery over you can leave it right side up and let the inductive charging take over.

Maybe it was my initial let down of the way it looked or I could have been a little off after breathing in concrete dust from the hundreds of booths jack hammering away, but I admit I zoned out a little as I was shown the more technical aspects of the wireless charging. After the demos concluded I was about to walk away, when suddenly it hit me.

Why hadn’t I made the connection before?

I've often thought how I would love to minimize all the annoying shop issues, and here was the answer to possibly the most annoying one staring me right in the face. If your shop is anything like mine you have a charging station on a wall with a few chargers there.

In addition, for each cordless tool you have at least 2 or 3 batteries as your backups for when you run out of juice. You might have already made the jump, but bear with me here. With the wireless charging there is no need to remove the battery from the tool to charge it. I’m going to repeat that, no need to remove the battery from the tool to charge it.

Picture this: with a regular battery you walk over to your charging station, start charging a battery, put in a new one (or realize they are all dead and have to wait for a charge), then walk back.

Now picture what it’s like with the wireless charging. Instead of a charging station, you have a charger on every work table in your shop. Instead of having the tool just sit there when you put it down, you put it on the charger and then when you want to use it again you pick it up. As long as I put it down in the holder, there is no extra step between charging and not charging. This means that for every tool I have I will only ever need one battery, and I will never run out of charge. Game changer!