My kids are getting a Power Wheel for Christmas from a relative. So I am looking at some sites and it seems to be very recommended to get an extra battery because they drain down so fast. The PW brand batteries are fairly expensive for a 12V 9.5 Ah battery. So I was looking around and found” this adapter”:Amazon.com.
Is say you can use any regular 12V 9.5 Ah battery safely. Apparently the PW battery just has a unique plug for safety reasons. I totally understand that.
As long as the connectors fit tightly, no reason it shouldn’t work fine. Finding a battery to fit well into the holder might be a problem. $60 for the PW battery is a rip for sure. Feel the wires and connectors to see if they remain cool . Years ago , PW actually recalled their cars because of poor connections getting hot and melting. Might even consider adding some solder to the connectors to get a better contact. Can always heat them up in the future to remove when the battery gets old and you want to reuse the harness.
And change out the 12V lead acid battery for a 5S lithium ion battery pack.
Now that I think about it, wouldn’t it be easier, and even cheaper in some cases, to parallel 2x power drill battery packs?
I’ve seen 100Wh battery packs fairly cheap in some places recently, and paralleling them would give you more capacity.
Options:
1. Huge and heavy 1000Wh lead acid battery with adapter.
2. 2x power tool battery packs in parallel. Would get more power output than the 12V lead acid, and more capacity than the Power Wheels battery. And since it’s much lighter, it would boost the efficiency of the vehicle by a fair margin, especially compared to the 12V 80Ah battery pack.
And heck, the 12V 80Ah lead acid monster shouldn’t be discharged more than 50% anyway, so it would go to being a 12V 80Ah to a 12V 40Ah.
A couple years ago I bought several 2 pack 12v drill packs from home Depot—- e use them in the grand kids power Wheels—I went ahead and bought the charger so i could just use the pack with its circuitry—- a 6v four wheeler hauls butt running 12v Lithium
I went through this with my kids. We had a John Deere Gator electric car. I replaced the battery with this, and added a charger harness out the front, and used a Deltran Battery Tender to charge it. They are basically wheel chair batteries. I just spliced into the stock cables.
