Then suddenly your Shark vacuum has issues. After a heavy clean, you plug it back into charge. You plug it in to recharge after a big cleaning session. Nothing happens. No lights go solid white as they normaly would. Instead two flash on and off quickly. The first indicator light starts blinking followed by the third one. What? It’s like the battery’s overheating. Wait. That doesn’t make any sense.
So you unplug it and plug it right back in again. No luck. The blinking continues constantly. Something must be physically wrong with this thing, you think. You think about replacing whole battery pack. Those things aren’t cheap. They’re also tough to come by. You don’t want to get rid of entire vacuum.
Why Your Vacuum Won’t Charge
But then you recall what you were doing with it. Running it for a while. And you was running the motor at MAX the whole time. Which sucks a ton of power out of cells. It makes the battery crazy-hot when you run it like that. You turn it off and immediately start charging it. Charging a hot battery are a bad idea.
So there’s also thermal protection in this system. It knows if it’s getting too hot inside and shuts itself off if it tries to charge while it is hot. And those flash codes mean thats what it’s doing. It’s telling you to shut it off, give me a minute, I’m going to cool down. That’s not a code. It is not an error code. It’s just heat management feature to keep things from getting too hot.
Now, you want to put this hypothesis to the test. So, you pull out the charging cord. You place the vacuum on floor and let it sit for a few minutes, like 30 minutes or so. This allows cells to shed some heat. It will also allow outside of the case to reach ambient temperature. When you pick up vacuum, it’s not warm. In fact, it’s cool to the touch.
Eventually you return vacuum to its base. You gently set it down onto the charging dock. It locks in place. You watch as the indicator lights respond. It quickly checks its sensors. All the crazy blinking shuts off completely. The lights calm to an even pace. That means normal charging is resuming. The overheating alert simply goes away by itself. You don’t even have to press any reset buttons. A little cooling time and a bit of patience are all that’s required.
This time, you follow the charge carefully. Slowly but surely, battery meter increases. It’s all normal. The system is functioning exactly as it should of be. Everything you panicked about earlier was entirely baseless. You nearly bought a replacement part for no reason at all. That would’ve been an expensive error.
It’s completely your use patterns that caused this. You were running the max out of the motor and you got it hot. Running it hot then plugging it in cause the safety lock. It’s easy to get yourself into that situation. A lot of folks clean their batteries then plug right back in. That didn’t even cross their mind about thermal limits.
It’s a different experience and it will change how you treat your vacuum from here on out. For those heavy carpet area, you’ll still go into MAX mode. However, instead of just plugging it in, you take a breather first. The break is enough to avoid that flashing light problem. Probably helps with battery life too. Lithium cells degrades due to heat after repeated cycles.
When that happens, don’t panic. First check what you’ve been doing with it recently. Have you used it a long time? Has the power setting remained set high? Then all you have to do is let it cool down. Unplug it.
You do not need any tools or technical skill. No panels to open up. No hidden screws to unscrew. Just let nature run its course and it work. Over time the heat goes away. The vacuum goes back into normal operating mode on its own.
I’m a dunce, it was nothing. Silly me, I thought it was something serious at first. Duh! Such an easy fix. Of course it wasn’t hardware. Should’ve known better by now with the heat limits. Resting is good, and the vacuum comes alive fast. Fully charged again, no more problems.
