A couple days ago, I was taking out some garbage at work.
Lo and behold! What’s this on top of everything else in the dumpster? A small electric scooter!
Electric vehicles are so simple and reliable that there really are very few things that go wrong with them. I’ve seen a lot of scooters and things gotten rid of just because the batteries were abused until they no longer work.
I threw the scooter in the back of my pickup truck to play with at home later that evening.
That evening, I took a look at what the problem could be – why someone would just throw it away. It was obvious that mice had been nibbling on the wiring insulation. One wire was completely chewed-through. I just stripped the two halves of that wire, twisted the ends together, and covered it with electrical tape.
The nuts and bolts that held in the batteries just needed a little penetrating oil. (Those are steel, almost the entire rest of the scooter is aluminum.) Once out, I tested the batteries with my multimeter. Is 0.7V on a 12V battery bad!?!?!? Of course it is.
So, I just hooked up two other known good batteries in their place. I had recently been working on my electric motorcycle, so I had several Optima Yellow Top batteries handy. A couple of jumper cables later, and I was ready to test the scooter…..
….And it worked.
Somebody threw away the scooter because they had killed the batteries and wouldn’t fix one wire.
Oh well, free scooter for me!
