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The
Ego Street Scooter uses four 12 volt lead acid
batteries. The
supplied charger will charge these in series. This is called
"string" or "bulk" charging. I'm sure many people reading this will have sat in their car on a cold winters morning and been unable to get the engine started. You will have called out one of the breakdown services and a very very nice man has told you that you have a dead cell in your battery. Your car battery consists of six individual 2 volt cells connected in series to give 12 volts. These six cells are string charged by your alternator. Over time one or more of these cells will become weaker than the others. These weaker cells will take less charge than the others and so the situation just gets worse and worse until a cell dies altogether and you need to buy a new battery. With the Ego the situation is much worse. You have twenty four 2 volt cells all being charged in series, this makes it far more likely that individual cells will become unbalanced and thus lead to battery failure. So what can be done about this? There is no permanent solution to this because you can't charge the cells individually. However the onset of problems can be delayed by making sure that each 12 volt battery is kept as balanced as possible. We recommend that each battery be given a balancing charge about once a month. To do this you will need to gain access to the tops of the batteries. If you lift up your seat you will see fours bolt and one screw. Remove these, lift the seat unit straight upwards and remove it. Now you will see the batteries (there may be a piece of insulating material on top of these). Charge the scooter as normal with the supplied charger until the green light comes on. Disconnect the charger and switch off the main scooter circuit breaker. Next, using a standard 12 volt car charger, charge each battery for about 30 minutes. Be careful not to short anything out while doing this. This procedure should bring all of your batteries upto the same voltage, you can check this with a multimeter if you have one available. Taking the time to do this once a month should help increase the servicable life of your batteries which is good news for both your pocket and the environment. |