40V Kobalt electric mower battery issues

Tigger73

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We have a 40V kobalt mower that seems to have refused to work with anything over a 2.5Ah battery which sucks for run time. We purchased a replacement 5A battery and had it completely charged but when we put it in the mower, it will spin up and then just die. We returned that battery to Lowe’s and ended up purchasing a 4.0 Ah battery like it had originally came with and it did the same thing with that battery fully charged. This time I put the 4.0 battery into my trimmer and it worked flawlessly so I dont think it is the battery.
Placed the 2.5Ah battery into the mower and it runs flawlessly until the battery dies.
Any ideas what may be wrong?
 

Jake8131

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Did the 2.5Ah battery come with the mower?
 

MowerMike

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It sounds like there's something wrong with the mower's circuit board.
 

tom3

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Might probe the battery terminals with a meter. Maybe the high powered batteries are series or parallel wired some way that's different.
 

MowerMike

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Might probe the battery terminals with a meter. Maybe the high powered batteries are series or parallel wired some way that's different.

I seriously doubt this. All the batteries in a given series should be the same such that they are interchangeable in all tools that use that battery. Regardless of how the battery is wired internally, the terminal assignments should be the same.

However, it is remotely possible that there are different generations of this battery, which are incompatible with other generations of the tools. If this is the case, then the manufacturer should make this clear in the listing and packaging.
 

Born2Mow

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Or, like ink jet cartridges, there may be a small chip in the OEM battery so that only the manufacturer's battery works in that model. Remember that Keurig did that to their coffee "cups" on one model so that you had to buy their branded cups.
 

MowerMike

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Or, like ink jet cartridges, there may be a small chip in the OEM battery so that only the manufacturer's battery works in that model. Remember that Keurig did that to their coffee "cups" on one model so that you had to buy their branded cups.

Nope. The OP bought the battery at Lowe’s, so there’s no chance it was anything other than a genuine Kobalt OEM battery. Also, the OP noted that the battery worked properly in another Kobalt 40 volt tool. Besides, I’ve never seen any aftermarket equivalents to the Kobalt 40 volt batteries.
 
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