New 9V Connector

I woke up the other night to a faint buzzing downstairs, looked around for the source and finally clued in it was coming from the laundry room. The little plastic water leak detector behind the washing machine was beeping away, but thankfully there was no water, so I decided it must be a low battery level warning.

The only way to stop the noise was to remove the 9 volt battery, so found a screwdriver to pry open the detector. Still half asleep, I pulled too roughly on the battery connector and left the negative terminal stuck inside the battery. A drag, but the noise stopped, so, partly victorious, I climbed back into bed.

Le sigh
Yes, I did try to push the little terminal in, and no, it didn’t just magically reconnect to the wire.

The next day I looked up how much it was going to cost to replace the wounded little detector ($23+tax!) and wondered if I could instead buy a cheap 9V battery connector and try to fix it. Lots of them out there, but only in quantities of 5 or 10, and I couldn’t see me needing that many in this lifetime.

Didn’t take much internet sleuthing to discover what most of the world already knows: take the top of a dead 9V battery and use that. Hiding in plain sight.

The top and bottom of a 9V battery
New and old
The positive wire goes to the terminal that looks like a little crown.
Reused the original connector top from the detector rather than the battery bottom as I liked that it was more flexible. Hot glued to the working bits of the connector.

I’ve taken many things apart in my tinkering and puttering career – oh, the fizz of danger when slicing a golf ball in half and the rubber threads viciously unwound, or pulling the back off our ancient Panasonic television to see the tubes inside when I was a kid! – but it never dawned on me to carefully cut open a battery. That seemed a step too far, unnecessarily dangerous, the possibility of an explosion and/or toxic yuck oozing out and poisoning me. And possibly that can happen, so be careful.

The inside was interesting.

A couple of Instructables later and I had a fresh battery attached to the new connector on the little detector and put it back on duty. I’m a terrible solderer and it still worked, proving yet again that good enough is good enough. A very satisfying fix.

It’s easy enough to push the detector behind the washing machine, but getting it out was a hassle involving some fancy yoga moves and banging my head on the laundry tub, so the weird reused twist tie loop is my hack to give me something to hook a broom handle onto to haul it out.