charging Power Wheels 12V battery?

[dentaku]

Someone gave me this 12V sealed lead acid Power Wheel battery. It's at around 11.8V at the moment.
Can I charge this using a regular car battery charger?


OOps, I forgot to attach the photo.

[KD0CAC John]

Without knowing the charger spec.s ? the easy answer is no .
And the spec.s of the battery ?
Sealed batteries can only handle lower current , so as to not exceed the seal / vent of the battery .

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/

[Audioguru]

It is a small lead-acid battery so its charging current must be suitable for its size. A car battery is much larger so the high current from a car battery charger will cause it to explode, please post a video with sound of the explosion.

[TheAmmoniacal]

The answer is; maybe. But it depends on the charging current of the charger. Most car battery chargers I see these days are low-current ones (~3 A or less) i.e. portable and convenient.

The Power Wheels battery is most likely 9.5 Ah capacity (the one on Amazon is), with the charger being a 1 A charger. But the battery should handle ~3 A charge current (~30% capacity).

[dentaku]

It turns out there's quite a few people online who are into Power Wheels modding and stuff. Who knew?
Here's what I've found about these 9.5AH SLAs in a few different places.
"Stock PW batteries are 9.5AH. The general rule of thumb is to not charge at a rate more than 30% of the battery capacity. For a 9.5AH batter that is a 2.8Amp charge rate."
It seems that as long as you kept monitoring it you could get away with charging one with a bench power supply limiting the current.

[Mr J]

Easy, I remember this from an old military battery charger I saw for lead acid battery. Grab a power supply rated for 5 amps or more set at 12-13 volts, take a 1156 Automotive Lamp and put it in series with the battery, when the light goes out you know it's charged . The bulb limits the current to around 2.1 Amps.

[jakeisprobably]

It turns out there's quite a few people online who are into Power Wheels modding and stuff. Who knew?

   I was surprised to figure that out as well. The old power wheels from the mid to late 90's are the best. They have larger electric motors and really beefy plastic gears.
   Put 2× 12v batteries in series in one and watch an adult try to hold on at 50kph.... Yes, it works.
Someone tried to put an old one in the dumpster of a bike shop I used to work at... Shop guys get bored and do dumb stuff, it's part of the job description

[tron9000]

If your worried about it going pop, then you could hook it up to a low output constant current circuit (~100-500mA) and monitor it to make sure its not getting warm. If it get warms or hot at those currents then it could be a duff one. It will take a while to charge though for 9.5Ah at those currents.

If you do successfully charge it, monitor how long it took and be a good idea to verify its internal resistance

[larrybl]

I use a 12VDC wall wart to charge Sealed 12V batteries, and trickle charge mower batteries. The wart I use is rated at 1A.

[Kilrah]

Hope for you it's voltage is regulated to proper Lead-acid termination voltage.

[ousdif]

I think you can charge it normally using the power wheels batter charger on amazon. When I lost the old battery of my ride on car for my baby, I visited this power wheels battery guide http://www.on-line-today.com/power-wheels-battery on how to choose the right one and there it showed the same battery you added on the image.

[james_s]

Lead-acid batteries are pretty tolerant to abuse as far as charging goes. The cell voltage is self limiting although if you charge them too hard for too long you can boil the electrolyte away. I've used simple iron transformer type DC wall warts for charging before and it does work. It's even better to put an incandescent bulb in series to limit the current. There are lots of circuits out there for smarter chargers you can try.

I always wanted one of those Power Wheels cars when I was a kid but my family couldn't afford one. My friend's daughter has one and he replaced the lead acid batteries with a 4 cell LiPo, the thing really hauls.