Ask The Editors: Charged Your Battery Backwards – Help!
Reversed polarity problems.
This seems like a straightforward enough question but to help, there is a lot of info missing. When you say you hooked it up to the charger backward, we assume you mean you used an external battery charger and not that you hooked reversed the terminals when installing the battery in your quad? Also that the battery was removed from the ATV when you did this?
If that’s all the case, the only things you could have possibly damaged are the battery, your charger or both. Most modern chargers are equipped with polarity detection and shut down when they sense you have the terminals swapped but let’s just assume yours lacked this protection.
Reversing the terminals will generally drain the battery like a large scale capacitor. If this is the case, try giving the battery a proper charge the correct way and see if that solves your problem. If it doesn’t, try again with a different battery charger as it is possible you damaged the internal circuits of yours with the backward attempt. If the battery still won’t take a charge on a different charger, you likely damaged the battery itself and will have to replace it. Those are all of the possibilities if you removed the battery from your machine and charged it externally with the terminals reversed.
Now if you attempted charging it backward while still hooked up to the ATV (or reversed the terminals in your quad), this opens up several new cans of worms. The first thing to do is check your machine’s fuse(s). You don’t provide a year, make or model but many ATVs do indeed contain fuses that will blow in this precise situation to prevent further damage.
If you don’t have these or they check out, the possibility of damaging nearly any of the electrical components in the system – the only way to check these is to grab a multimeter, set it to measure resistance (ohms) and place your probes at the electrical contacts on the wiring points of each component to check for continuity.
And, like above, there’s always the possibility you damaged the battery, your charger or both.
