I am wondering if there is a chart of current draw on an unloaded scooter. My scooter is only going 5km on a full charge. The batteries are new. I am wondering the transaxle is the trouble.

hi, there is a chance that the reset switch has gone faulty, at worse the controller is drawing more current than it designed for so that may be a fault ready to happen, but let's be positive, the reset switch needs to be checked...

Regards
Rob

If the motor is overheating, it is drawing far more current out of
the batteries than it is supposed to. Assuming it is 2 x 13v x 33ah
batteries, these are good for about 2 to 3 years on my scooter and 'wheelchair. AGM (absorbent glass mat) lead acid batteries do deteriorate over time due to battery chemistry.

Although the batteries may appear to take a charge
and the voltage 12.6volt x 2 = 25.2 volts nominal, with no load
on them, the motor controller takes a whack of current to get you going.

I have an digital voltmeter/ammeter installed on my Pride XL scooter and I was amazed how much current the motor/motor controller takes from the batteries. 50 to 80amps on startup.

If the battery voltage drops due to the age of the batteries, as the
energy is being used up from them, the current required by the
motor for rotation has to go up, and that will cause overheating of the controller and the motor. It is Ohms law plain and simple
the less voltage available-the more current required to do the
work and current creates the heating effect.

I replace my batteries every two years. Can't take a chance on
being stuck with discharged batteries.

Change the batteries. It sounds like your batteries are not able to hold a full charge.

Take your batteries out, and take them down to .a battery shop. Have the battery load tested, Reading the voltage under no load conditions will not tell you much, normally the batteries voltage gives you its state of charge. These batteries will show a full charge at no load, as soon as you put any load at all on the voltage drops off and you don't have much in amperage output. The amperage is what is important when you right down to it. When load testing your battery they will use an instrument that they punch in the cranking amps. The instrument will look for the voltage drop off at a load of what ever amp value you punched into the instrument. The instrument will give you a pass\fail indication for the cranking amps value the technician punched into the keypad. There can be a problem when load testing batteries. The technician doesn't key in a amperage value, This is what happened to me. The instrument when no value is entered will use a default value, Say the default amperage is usually set at around 200 Cranking amps. My technician was either rushed or just being lazy. He set the load tester to use the default values, my battery passed with the tester set up the way it was. My battery is a 35 amp\hr battery and puts out 480 cranking amps In actuality my batteries weren't putting out nearly that much. It would put out 265 cranking amps for about 2 seconds then die. He told me the batteries were good. When i brought the batteries back to him
i didn't let him take them into thee back room. THIS TIME HE DID THE CHECKS OUT IN PLAIN SIGHT OF ME. I asked to do a comparison between my batteries and new ones. We had to retest a number of time in order to find the upper limit of the new batteries. As it turned out my batteries were bad and all my problems disappeared with my old batteries. NOTE, scooters use deep cycle batteries only Glass mate batteries if you want to take your scooter on a flight.

Now if you had your batteries load tested and you know their good, its got to be the charger thats malfunctioning. Check the charger connection points make sure there tight. One connector should go to the negative battery terminal, the other connector should go too the positive terminal and read +24v. Make sure the connections are solid.

How long does it take to charge a battery? There are allot of variables to this but generally speaking if a charger is a four amp charger and you got a 35amp/hr battery it will take roughly 8 hrs to charge. Batteries typically don't like to be cold. My batteries are 35amp/hr my scooter will go 25 miles @ a max speed of 6 mph. The run time is roughly 5.5 hrs with a draw of about 6amps

I'm assuming you have a full charge on your batteries? The problem is that the charger can be fulled into thinking that your batteries are at a full charge when they are not. The battery will put out he correct voltage so your voltage gage reads right. The battery will put out the correct resistance so the charger will see a charged battery. Chargers work by resistance the lower the resistance the harder the charger works to charge the battery. So the only way to determine the real state of charge is to bring the batteries to a battery shop. Have them load test the battery in your presence if the battery is new. This is not a pass or fail test.What we are looking for is the upper limit of the cranking amps the battery will output.They may tell you this battery isn't supposed to be measured that way because in battery is not used to start a car. Well most of the equipment is geared for measuring car batteries. For what we are doing here it doesn't matter. For my scooter batteries i use two 12v 35amp/hr batteries. Have them grab a new one off the shelf, have them find the upper limit of the amp output. What happened to me is i didn't watch them do this test. The instrument he was using will give you a pass.or fail indication at a preset level of about 150 amp/hr unless you manually input a higher level to test for. This was a new battery and they want it to pass. I had them find the upper limit of a new off the shelf battery by entering higher values into the test instrument until it failed back off on the value until i found it passed. A new battery like the one my scooter uses will put out close to 500 cranking amps. Well when i tested my battery it barely reached 200 cranking amps. So in fact this battery doesn't have the capacity of the off the shelf battery. So as you load it the voltage goes down. My motor controller will detect that and give me a fail indication.

oK if this is not the problem we can look for amp leaks. Put a amp meter between the battery and the load. Turn the scooter off, get a reading?.If you do something is either on or a resistive short drawing down your battery. Disconnect stuff until the reading is zero. What ever you disconnected last will give you the section of the scooter the problem is coming from. Like if you disconnect the control head and it drops to zero i would start there. Turn the scooter on there should be an indication, but it should be under an amp. Now get the rear wheels up so that they can rotate freely. Apply just enough power to move the wheels. Look at the meter if its a analog meter does it jump around. Does the motor stall at any time. If the first thing happens you have a partially shorted winding in the motor. IF the second thing happens the meter will jump up or down indicating either an open or shorted winding.
Now floor it jot down the amp draw. IS it excessive? We check this by doing the math. My scooter use two 12 v 35 amp/hr batteries hooked in series. So i have a 24v system @ 35amp/hr, the scooter has a loaded range of 25 mile at a speed of 5 mph.So my battery life is going to be about 5 hours. So we can say the motor loaded on a flat surface will use about 7 amp/hr. So running the motor flat out unloaded is going to be less than 7 amp/hr. My scooter's motor runs at about >5 amp/hr unloaded. Hope this helps

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Problem with Scooters
schooter slowsdown that stops after a while schooter starts

Posted by avatarLeonard Cannon on Apr 26, 2012

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I'm assuming you have a full charge on your batteries? The problem is that the charger can be fulled into thinking that your batteries are at a full charge when they are not. The battery will put out he correct voltage so your voltage gage reads right. The battery will put out the correct resistance so the charger will see a charged battery. Chargers work by resistance the lower the resistance the harder the charger works to charge the battery. So the only way to determine the real state of charge is to bring the batteries to a battery shop. Have them load test the battery in your presence if the battery is new. This is not a pass or fail test.What we are looking for is the upper limit of the cranking amps the battery will output.They may tell you this battery isn't supposed to be measured that way because in battery is not used to start a car. Well most of the equipment is geared for measuring car batteries. For what we are doing here it doesn't matter. For my scooter batteries i use two 12v 35amp/hr batteries. Have them grab a new one off the shelf, have them find the upper limit of the amp output. What happened to me is i didn't watch them do this test. The instrument he was using will give you a pass.or fail indication at a preset level of about 150 amp/hr unless you manually input a higher level to test for. This was a new battery and they want it to pass. I had them find the upper limit of a new off the shelf battery by entering higher values into the test instrument until it failed back off on the value until i found it passed. A new battery like the one my scooter uses will put out close to 500 cranking amps. Well when i tested my battery it barely reached 200 cranking amps. So in fact this battery doesn't have the capacity of the off the shelf battery. So as you load it the voltage goes down. My motor controller will detect that and give me a fail indication.

oK if this is not the problem we can look for amp leaks. Put a amp meter between the battery and the load. Turn the scooter off, get a reading?.If you do something is either on or a resistive short drawing down your battery. Disconnect stuff until the reading is zero. What ever you disconnected last will give you the section of the scooter the problem is coming from. Like if you disconnect the control head and it drops to zero i would start there. Turn the scooter on there should be an indication, but it should be under an amp. Now get the rear wheels up so that they can rotate freely. Apply just enough power to move the wheels. Look at the meter if its a analog meter does it jump around. Does the motor stall at any time. If the first thing happens you have a partially shorted winding in the motor. IF the second thing happens the meter will jump up or down indicating either an open or shorted winding.
Now floor it jot down the amp draw. IS it excessive? We check this by doing the math. My scooter use two 12 v 35 amp/hr batteries hooked in series. So i have a 24v system @ 35amp/hr, the scooter has a loaded range of 25 mile at a speed of 5 mph.So my battery life is going to be about 5 hours. So we can say the motor loaded on a flat surface will use about 7 amp/hr. So running the motor flat out unloaded is going to be less than 7 amp/hr. My scooter's motor runs at about >5 amp/hr unloaded. Hope this helps

Hi, Something maybe touching the battery terminal and arcing is occuring. Check terminals again.
You may have to strap down the battery better. Good luck

The battery lights dropping down while the scooter is in motion is normal; the motors are drawing current from the batteries which is going to drop the battery level slightly. However, if you see the battery indicator lights dropping off steadily while the scooter is in motion (1 bar every few minues or seconds) this can indicate a battery problem. It sounds like this is normal operation!
Good luck!

Hi. Does the machine stop suddenly, or does it slowly stop as it normally would? Does this happen on hills or slopes?
A lot of scooters have a self-resetting circuit breaker connected to the battery leads. If the machine draws to much current ( amps ) then the circuit breaker trips out. After a few minutes the circuit breaker will reset and you can continue.
This could mean that the circuit breaker is faulty or that the motor is drawing to much current, or is burnt out.
Some machines have a very light duty circuit breaker, and these can trip out often. I have changed many of these circuit breakers for this reason.
Check all your battery leads are secure and tight.
If it is still a problem, get a serviceman to check the motor current is what it should be.
Good luck. Neil.

It probably means that the connections or wiring from your battery are loose or broken. When you add the extra current required to run the motors, the voltage is being lost. Monitor the battery voltage with a meter while trying to drive the scooter will prove this.