Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

DeWalt 20V battery pack varieties, capacities and runtimes: Learn from my mistake. Not all batteries are created equal. I needed the DeWalt 20V cordless circular saw and the tool-only option was so much cheaper than the tool with 1 battery and charger, that I was almost able to buy a 20V drill, charger and 2 batteries with the savings, so that's what I did. While shopping for the new 20V drill, I had vaguely noticed slight differences in the sizes and colors of the batteries that came with them and I also noticed large disparity in the prices of various 20V drills. I purchased the cheapest one (it was mostly for the batteries after all) and, in general, thought that both the saw and the drill performed with excellence; however, on jobs where I was using only the drill, I noticed I could go all day on 1 battery, but on days where I needed the saw, I noticed the second battery was dead long before the first one had a chance to re-charge. That is when I started to take notice of the different sizes and colors of the various DeWalt 20V battery packs out there. It wasn't easy to find hard numbers to compare one to another, but I did manage to find what I was looking for by cobbling together information from multiple websites. Here is what I found: Model Capacity Name Color Size DCB201 - 1.5Ah - 20V compact - black - thin DCB200 - 3.0Ah - 20V standard - black - thick DCB203 - 2.0Ah - 20V XR compact - yellow - thin DCB204 - 4.0Ah - 20V XR premium - yellow - thick As you can see from the table, the compact eXtreme Runtime battery gives you 33% more runtime than the compact, the standard 20V gives you 100% more runtime than the compact and the XR premium gives you 266% more runtime than the compact. Purchasing this 2 pack of XR premium nearly tripled my runtime from 3Ah total (2 x 1.5) to 11Ah total (2 x 1.5 + 2 x 4) for both tools. My crew is now capable of running both tools all day without re-charging, but I didn't need the drill and the batteries that came with it weren't getting the job done with the saw. I should have purchased this discounted 2-pack of XR Premium batteries instead of the drill and pocketed some savings. Price: All 4 battery varieties are available in 1 and 2-packs. Prices vary and sales happen, so things may change, but at the time of my purchase, the DCB204 2-pack was absolutely the best value for Ah/$ and enabled me to increase the most runtime for the fewest dollars by far and away over the smaller batteries or the XR premium 1-pack. Size and weight: The tools and the batteries have performed flawlessly thus far and just work all day without recharging. The only trade offs I have noticed with the DCB204 XR premium batteries is that they are much more suited for the saw than the drill. They are more than twice as heavy as the compact batteries and, for those of you who are familiar with the DeWalt line of 18V batteries, they are only slightly smaller and lighter than those and add considerable heft and imbalance to the drill. The extra weight is only felt when carrying the saw, but not while running it. As a result, we have developed a workaround of using the XR premium batteries on the saw and the compact ones on the drill and that enables both tools to run all day. Lesson learned, just because the batteries are interchangeable, doesn't mean they will accomplish what you set out to do with them. Get the big batteries for your big tools!