🪫 Hoverboard Battery Salvage, Replacement

I came into the possession of a malfunctioning hoverboard, volunteering to attempt a repair – at the very least a diagnosis. The nature of the malfunction was not known, but my initial guess was that the battery died. I took it home to see if I could fix it, hoping that I would be lucky and need only re-connect a loose connection.

🔍 Troubleshooting

I open up the electronics enclosure to expose the wiring to confirm my suspicion.

• ✅ AC-DC power supply produces correct 42 V
• ✅ 42 V was being applied to the battery pack
• ❌⚠️🚨 Correct battery pack voltage (36 V)🚨⚠️❌

The battery pack was reading ~ 30 V, far too low to be caused by an otherwise functional but depleted battery. Bad news, the whole pack will need to be replaced (I could replace the offending batteries with working ones, but this would require an effort beyond what I can justify to myself).

♻️ Salvage and Scrap 🗑️

Presumably, I thought, some of the batteries in the pack would still be functional and may yet have a purpose, so I carefully broke them out of their assembly for testing. All but 4 were usable. Two were totally dead, giving voltage readings of ~ 2 V, and another two had a layer of oxidized metal at the terminals, but gave otherwise normal voltage readings. I disposed of all four, leaving me with six (6)!🙂 working batteries.

These batteries are not especially good quality. In fact, they are dirt cheap, low capacity (2000 mAh) and it is no mystery that they died. I don’t care, I’ll keep using this garbage anyway. My flashlights use 18650 batteries, and it will be good to have them around. I discharge them to storage voltages, record it in my battery management spreadsheet, and say goodbye for now.

🔄 Replacement

I was intending on buying a replacement battery pack but I was instead gifted an entirely functional replacement hoverboard, at a price I am told was less than the price of a new battery pack alone due to strange shipping prices for batteries. Many such cases.

🔋 Done.