Hello, and thanks for reading my 'How to Make a Solar Powered Lawn Mower.' I didn't take any pictures of it when I was building it, as I was to busy building it. I hope you will enjoy this Instructable and get some good ideas on your own project.

Step 1: The Battery

So one night I was walking to my house and a neighbor was throwing out an old cordless lawn mower. Sweet! But there was a catch, batteries where toast. Why you may asked? Over charged from the wall changer caused the battery to swell and crack. The two bad battery's that where in the lawn mower where 12v, 10ah and need to be replaced. I made a decision to replace the old battery's with the same capacity batteries to fit in the removable battery.

Step 2: Everything I Needed

So for a long time I wanted to make solar powered lawn mower. I already have a solar panel mounted outside from another projects. My solar panel is a 12V 500ma solar panel I got from eBay. I also have a solar charger controller that works with my battery's I picked up for a kit.

KEEP IN MIND

I was hoping I could recharge my two battery's in parallel but keeping them in series but it won't work. Unless you broke the series circuit before wiring them in parallel and then breaking the parallel circuit when you want series circuit, if not, a short will happened.

Step 3: To Recharge

To prevent a short I have two pig tails coming from the removable battery, for each battery. To recharge the removable battery I plug my solar panel and solar battery charger controller to one of the pig tail and wait for the controller "charge" LED turns green. Once one battery is fully charged I switched over to the other battery until the solar change controller LED turns green.

When I got the new batteries I had to remake the connections to add the pig tails for the solar panels. Other than that this was the hardest part to make as the battery area was pretty small from the start and adding more wire didn't help.

Something I should add is that gel cell battery's can't take a high change current. A while ago I have read online article that was taking about the charge current on sealed gel cell. The article said that the charge current for a gel cell battery shouldn't be anymore then {C/20 = charge current} where C is the capacity of the battery. so for me my 10 amp hour battery should have a maximum change current of 500ma and I do.

Step 4: All Together

The battery takes about 2 to 3 days to fully recharge and it can fully mow my lawn with battery capacity to spare about 50%. In this picture you can see I have two solar panels connected to the removable battery. The two solar panels are electrically separated so there isn't any risk of the a short circuit. If I use the two solar panels the recharge time is about a day and a half.