Outdoors because it involves my kid's power wheel.

It wasn't working with a fully charged battery, so I start troubleshooting. I hook up battery to voltmeter, it reads more than 12 volts.

I expose the motors on the power wheel rear axle, and using two small wires, I touch the motor terminals to the battery terminals, and nothing happens.

Yet when I touch these wires to a 9 volt battery, the wheels spin. I do even another test using my trailer's 12v battery. Touch wires, and wheels spin. So motors are clearly working. I tried both motors (one is reverse) and both work.

I then realize I could have just tried my neighbors power wheels battery, so I do, and it works fine. low/high and reverse all work and gas pedal (a simple switch) works fine.

So question is, how can a battery show it's putting out proper voltage, but not actually power something?

Could be a dead cell and is not producing the amps needed. Seen it happen when a car battery shows to be charged but will not start. That's my best guess

Put a meter on your battery while is hooked up to the PW

push the gas switch

Meter reading will probably go from ~12V to ~0V with a load applied, if it does it is a bad battery

This is how you determine which battery in a golf cart is bad if you don't want to replace all of them.

nonameag99 said:

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Put a meter on your battery while is hooked up to the PW

push the gas switch

Meter reading will probably go from ~12V to ~0V with a load applied, if it does it is a bad battery

This is how you determine which battery in a golf cart is bad if you don't want to replace all of them.

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I can't really do that. The power wheel has a big plastic connector that plugs into battery and completely hides the connectors.

Poke your meter leads into the wire insulation

I hate working with electricity. Too much voodoo. Troubleshoot it til you nail down the culprit then replace. AKA, buy a new battery.

I cut up the flashlight that came with my 18V power tool set and wired it in place of the battery. Clip an 18V battery into the old flashlight housing and you've got a rechargeable battery and a lot more speed. That slow ass old power wheels will spin the tires now. Battery doesn't last as long as the 12V but I have 6 of the 18V from my tools.

Once you confirm battery is dead, buy a pair of 12v12ah SLA batteries on flea bay. Buy this on amazon: SafeAMP Wire Harness Connector for Fisher-Price Power Wheels 12-Volt SLA Battery (connect to the SLA battery) . you can also splurge for the 12v18ah batteries and they will last for a long time.

Also I don't like the power wheel style charger I use a 2 amp trickle charger.

Cannew said:

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Once you confirm battery is dead, buy a pair of 12v12ah SLA batteries on flea bay. Buy this on amazon: SafeAMP Wire Harness Connector for Fisher-Price Power Wheels 12-Volt SLA Battery (connect to the SLA battery) . you can also splurge for the 12v18ah batteries and they will last for a long time.

Also I don't like the power wheel style charger I use a 2 amp trickle charger.

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I've actually already done this. I bought a 15Amp hour battery from Lowes.