Motor Scooters: Batteries

Motorscooter safety

Motorscooter Safety
Driving a Motorscooter
MSF Manual: Your Scooter
Important, before you drive
Motorscooter Helmets
All-weather Scootering
The Oily Path of Safety

What drives your motorscooter?

The Scooter Engine
Scooter Transmissions

Motorscooter Journal

Motorscooter Journal
The Scooterdoc
Scooter Choice Ethics
Left-handed Motorscooters

Other Types of Scooters

Mobility Scooters
Scooter-inspired Vehicles
Electric Motorscooters
The Three-wheel Scooter

Reference

State Regulations
Technical Gov. Requirements

Motor Scooter Links
Motorscooter listing
Add Your Scooter Link

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Keeping Your Motorscooter Battery Healthy

The battery in a motorscooter is unlike the one in car. It has relatively little capacity, is constantly drained by alarms and headlights, and does not charge as readily as a car battery does.

The Problem

A motorscooter battery may lose significant charge if the scooter has not been run for a week or two, and it usually takes more than a short run to charge it. One tends to see dead scooter batteries in winter when scooting is at a minimum. Also, Chinese scooter batteries are clearly inferior, but domestic ones are not much better. The always-on headlights, together with the on-by-default alarm systems on most scooters (See Chinese Scooter Alarms) both contribute quickly to dead scooter batteries.

The Solution

Keep your battery charge up, with a charger if necessary! Of course, it is usually possible to kick start your machine, but, particularly if the plug gets wet, it can take a good bit of fast cranking to get it going again and the kick starter can't seem to do the job (kick starting can also be painful, depending on the design. See Motorscooter Kick Starters.). You have to ride them very consistently to keep the battery up, so a trickle charger is almost essential equipment for a scooterist who does not ride on a daily basis.

Watch Out, don't jump it!

If your scooter won't turn over with the electric starter, a jump-start is not necessarily advisable. Even with the car engine off, a jump from a car battery can overpower the scooter electrical system, blowing fuses or worse (I've done it. The headlight fuse blew.). Keeping a fully charged battery is a much better solution.