Battery Boxes

Hi all,
Any tips on where to get a couple of 8878 rechargeable battery boxes plus a charger? Thanks.

Hi there,

You buy them from Lego Shop@home for $99.99, although they are cheaper on Bricklink.com.
Check it out: http://www.bricklink.com/search.asp?q=%208878

The charger [ transformer] part is the tricky bit.

If you buy from an American BL store, then the charger will be for 110V so you will have to buy a voltage converter to make it 240V.

They don't make [ I think ] a charger with an Australian plug but a European plug will work with a travel adaptor

The batteries are great as you can set the speed.

Don't bother buying a LEGO charger. The rechargeable batteries have built in over voltage and current limiting protection, so you can use any 12V charger with a plug that fits. They are much cheaper than the LEGO 10V charger too. There were tests published in a topic on Eurobricks that suggested the protection circuit worked at anything up to about 18V but the battery could be harmed beyond that.

The only thing you need to be careful of is the polarity of the plug. There are 12V transformers available which have a selection of different sized plug adaptors that can be reversed so you can reverse the polarity. That's what I use. They are available from electronics shops like Jacar and Dick Smiths. If you get the polarity wrong the protection circuit of the battery kicks in so you wont harm it, but it won't charge either. You probably don't need anything more than a 12V 150mA transformer (normally printed on the case) as from memory the maximum current draw while charging was about 100mA, any thing from 80 - 150 mA would be OK, just the lower end will mean longer charging times, anything at or above 100mA will charge in much the same time.

I'd buy the battery from whichever Bricklink store has them cheapest when you factor in shipping. I bought a couple from a US bricklink store.

brickie wrote:
They don't make [ I think ] a charger with an Australian plug but a European plug will work with a travel adaptor

I'm not quite sure on this since I found a better and cheaper solution, but initially if you ordered a charger from the Australian LEGO web shop, they shipped European plugs. They also initially shipped European plugs when Australian retailers ordered them through LEGO Australia (according to Brad from Bricks to the World a couple of years ago). They may have started producing an Australian plug version since then but I've never seen one, and I've displayed with at least half of the LEGO trainheads on the east coast over the last few years. (Note to self, must plan trip to Brisbane