Razor E200 Battery Upgrade

In February, my brother-in-law-once-removed, Colin, was kind enough to donate his Razor E200 scooter to a new home… mine!

Now, I’ve been coveting an electric bike/scooter for some time and so I am very thankful to Colin for his kind donation. The scooter came with two caveats. One, that it was to be loved and used. Check! Neighbours and family, from 3 year old Harry to mother-in-law Betty have loved zipping up and down our quiet road on this incredible device. I’ve been using it to get to work too;  but more on that later. The second caveat was that there was some minor work needed doing. The battery needed replacing and I was to discover that the rear tyre valve had dropped back into the wheel and so I was unable to re-inflate without removing the wheel.

Batteries first. Colin had said that the OEM Razor batteries weren’t up to much so I set about finding clones. The official Australian dealer only sold the originals and didn’t bother to respond to my enquiry about shipping cost so I didn’t bother with them. eBay turned up two dealers in the USA who sold non-OEM but the shipping costs of two lead-acid batteries added 50%. Lastly, I tried a local business, Forbes Batteries. Now I don’t mind admitting that I was sceptical. Local businesses here in regional Queensland are mostly awful to deal with offering high prices and poor customer service. But Forbes Batteries buck the trend. I made contact via their website and they came back less that 48 hours later saying they’d done some research and believed they had something that would suit. Amazingly they opened on Saturdays and so I went down with the scooter and the two kids. The person I’d been dealing with didn’t work on Saturdays but he’d left instructions and the batteries were duly fetched.

Remco Battery for Razor E200 Scooter

Now, the OEM batteries have a wire that sticks out of them, joining the two batteries with a proprietary connector on the end. Forbes had a suitable replacement but it had spade connectors on it. Happy that the battery would fit, they cut the wires off the old batteries, fitted spade connectors to the end of the proprietary wire and checked it all fitted in… which it did!

Scooter Battery showing Spade Connector

New Batteries Installed in Razor E200 Scooter

So, hats off to Forbes Batteries’ professionalism, knowledge and service.

Back home, fitting the batteries was quite straightforward, if a little tight. Removing the rear wheel was a little more complex that I’d thought it would be. I should have taken photos of how the brake assembly is supposed to look as it took a bit of thinking to get it back together. Thankfully Colin had included a spare rear wheel in his box of goodies so I have deferred fixing the original wheel for another day.

Razor E200 Electric Scooter

All back together, the Razor charges in about 4 hours and runs for about 30-40 mins on the flat or about 10 mins on my uphill run home from work. Once I get a handlebar mount for my Ideos I’ll use My Tracks to log the journeys that it’s capable of on a single charge.