There it is, that moment when you pull the trigger on a new DeWalt impact driver, feeling the torque through your finger. It’s the payoff of the investment, the moment you’ve been waiting for. Until you remember not having registered the tool.
Go to the website to turn on the three year warranty and it stalls out, won’t accept the code. Or the confirmation email dissapears. Excitement becomes annoyance in seconds.
It’s more than just clicking a button. A bad drop, a dead battery, a defect, that’s what your warranty protects you from. If you don’t have one, then you’re on your own.
Sure, a registration error isn’t such a big deal to fix… unless you ignore it. Then you’re at risk. Most often it’s not because DeWalt has an outage.
How To Fix DeWalt Registration Issues
Common Registration Errors
It’s because there was a typo entered in the serial number field. It could also be that something wasn’t understood about their validation process for new users, or some other local browser issue. First thing is to get your serial number.
Locating and Reading Serial Numbers
Don’t read a zero as an O or an I for a 1. They put it in there for you. Just look closely.
It’s usually on a yellow or white label near the chuck or base. It is often around the base or chuck of the tool. The code will be printed there.
First clean away the grime. Construction sites are filthy places, and a smudge can obscure the code. If you copied it from an emailed receipt, double check that you didn’t transcribe a trailing space after it.
That’s what most folks does wrong. It is not some kind of technical error but a transcription error. Another frequent culprit is browser problems.
Fixing Browser and Cache Issues
Older registration portal forms don’t always play nice with moddern browsers, which cache information so it loads faster. Your computer may be caching an old version of the form DeWalt’s site runs based off regular ol’ web technologies. Try deleting your cookies and cache.
Can’t get techy? Use another browser (or an incognito window) instead. Each major browser (Chrome), Firefox, Safari, handles form submission slightly differently.
The browser isn’t always at fault, either. For some reason, switching browsers are a quick-and-dirty fix for many cases. There’s also the issue of delayed emails.
Handling Delayed Confirmation Emails
Here’s what happens: You type in your information and then wait for that confirmation link to land in your inbox. But it doesn’t arrive. First check your spam folder (corporate email filters can be aggressive at tagging any kind of automated notification as spam).
If not, wait 10 minutes; sometimes servers puts messages in a queue during periods of high traffic. And don’t click the submit button repeatedly. This will create duplicates and lock you out.
Being patient prevent these problems. The password rules can be finicky when setting up a new account. For some reason, DeWalt wants passwords to include both upper case and lower case characters, as well as numbers.
Password Requirements and Managers
They are serious about this. Many people overestimate their password strength. The system will simply not accept your password if it doesn’t include uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers.
It won’t even tell you that it failed. This is realy annoying. Make sure you pass the test for every field before pressing enter.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get a password manager. It’ll save time and prevent mistakes. A strong password protects your account history and purchase record.
Registering Older Tools
For older tools, registration might not be an option online, but the warranty is still valid and the process are just different. DeWalt changed their warranty policy recently. If you bought your tool prior to a specific date, you likely can’t register it online.
However, your warranty still stands; you just has to do things differently. Look at the paperwork included with your tool; it will indicate when the warranty started, as well as when you need to register it. You’ll know if you’ve forced an old serial number into the new system, because it won’t work.
There’s only one way forward: accept the original terms of purchase. And lastly: call support if nothing else. Be prepared with the serial number and receipt.
Generally, the DeWalt support team will be responsive. They can look up your purchase and enter it into their system behind the scenes to register the tool. Not as fast than clicking a button, but it happens.
So save that digital receipt in case, that’s what shows you bought the thing. Once registered, go build again. You would of peace of mind because your warranty is valid.