GOING ELECTRIC 3 How to care for your electric scooter battery

A 20-kilogram battery is installed under the seat of an electric scooter, Sept. 4. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

The battery is the most vital part of any electric vehicle, as a cursory glance through this newspaper's business section should convince you. It is the most important — and the most expensive — part of an electric vehicle. All the important technology is in that battery, not any other parts of the vehicle. You can't say that about any one part in an internal combustion engine — not the gas tank, not the battery, not the muffler.

My electric scooter, a Wacco E6S, comes with one single, big, heavy battery pack from Samsung SDI. It's about the size of a gas canister and weighs at least as much as one that's filled at 20 kilograms. Talking with other consumers, it appears this one has a much larger capacity than others, but also lacks flexibility of use. You only get one, no possibility of a backup, because a single battery costs almost 2 million won.

Some companies also offer swap stations. There are battery swap stations distributed throughout the city, and subscribers to this service can access depleted batteries swapped for fully charged ones. You could hypothetically drive as long as you want, as long as there are always swap stations around (and they always have fresh batteries). My friend Morgan, who bought his electric scooter a year before mine, showed me the distribution network for swap stations available to customers of his company, and they were concentrated in southern Seoul's Gangnam and Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, with maybe one north of the river as of that time. He said they would install more in his neighborhood if more of his neighbors bought scooters from the same company. For now, he has his own battery, with its own charging system.

From what I've seen so far, every electric scooter appears to use different batteries, so you can't exactly use Morgan's smaller battery in my larger bike. Some electric scooters have two smaller batteries, so you can always keep one charged, and it's easier to lug around. I saw someone in the elevator at work with one of these and was immediately envious of how portable and even stylish it appeared, at least compared to mine.

My battery is essentially a very large brick, with a small handle on top. It sits under the seat of the bike, and loading and unloading it from that space can be awkward due to its size. There's nothing on the bottom, just the battery. Actually, I haven't examined the bottom, mostly because I don't want to turn the thing sideways, but I know it doesn't have padding or wheels down there.

Morgan's battery apparently has a hole in the bottom, and he places it on top of the charger, impaling it on a spike that makes the charging connection. It's kind of a neat design.

Mine connects to a cable that connects to a charging device, which then connects directly to a wall socket (never an extension cord — the guy at the shop told me never to do this, without elaborating on what could happen). The charger is thankfully much smaller and lighter than the battery. It reminds me of the clunky old AC stepdown converter I had during my first year in Korea, a ridiculously inefficient apparatus intended to allow lower-voltage appliances to work on Korean voltage.

An electric vehicle battery is plugged into a charger in the break room at The Korea Times. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

To charge the battery, I take it out of the scooter and bring it inside to the charger. There is a port in the scooter itself where I could plug the charger into, enabling charging without removing the battery — but there are no wall sockets in my parking garage, and even if there were, there are the two questions of whether I would be stealing electricity by doing so, and also whether I should really be leaving this portable charger out there in public unsupervised for someone to steal. Yes, this is Korea where things left in public are usually safe, but electric vehicle battery theft seems like it will become an inevitability in the future.

Rather than lugging that thing up those stairs a couple of times a week, I tried sourcing all my battery charging to my office, which is on the 14th floor but at least has an elevator. However, that turned out not to be too fun either.

When in operation, the charger unit makes noise from an internal fan that cools it down (yes, the charger heats up a bit, but the battery never seems to). I try to tell myself it sounds like a white noise generator, but in truth it’s probably more like a hairdryer on a low setting. There’s no indication of charging progress, but it shuts off automatically when full, after about three hours if I have run the battery low.

I tried setting up to charge in the break room at work, where the door could be closed. Someone complained about the noise it was making, so I found an even more secluded and sound-insulated spot in the office, one of two phone booths that reporters can use to do interviews without being overheard. But when I came back for the battery, it appeared that someone displeased with the device had switched it off.

I’ve gone back to charging the thing at home.

A few weeks after that, I heard a familiar noise coming from the archive room, only to find a very similar battery setup to my own. I was able to find out one of my coworkers had bought the same model of electric scooter and was now charging it at work. Others who might remember when I was charging at work might now think I'm the one charging this one.

If I had kept charging my battery at work, at the same time as my coworker, I imagine people would think it's getting out of hand and we'd be disinvited from doing this. I can foresee a rise in social conflicts over charging electric vehicle batteries at workplaces.

The requirements for this electric vehicle battery have been reshaping various parts of my everyday life. I suppose you could say gas-powered vehicles had a structural influence on our lives too, but after over a century of use, I'm now having to unlearn that paradigm and enter this unfamiliar new one, all while carrying around a 20-kilogram battery.

So what's it like to drive around on an electric scooter? I'll fill you in next time.