Correct Charger Settings And An Off-Season Charging Regimen, Dramatically Extended The Battery Life Of This Golf Car Fleet
Congress Lake Club in Ohio Found That By Changing To The Correct Charger Settings, With An Off-Season Charging Regimen, Can Dramatically Extended The Battery Life Of Its Golf Car Fleet.
When Congress Lake Club in Hartville, Ohio purchased a new fleet of EZGO TXT golf cars in May of 2012 they didn’t expect to get sluggish performance right from the start. One of the club’s members, Bill Glover, retired U.S. Battery VP of Sales, immediately realized that the golf cars were not performing at their full potential. Since the golf cars were also outfitted with U.S. Battery products, Glover got with the club’s safety supervisor Lynne Vincent, and Bob Gegick, superintendent of grounds, to work on ways to solve the problem.
After doing some preliminary testing, it was determined that the batteries appeared to be undercharged. The first course of action was to put the batteries through a series of equalizing charges to see if their performance would improve. The result of this process showed improvement in the overall battery performance, indicating that this was most likely a charging issue and not a battery related problem. Glover contacted Delta-Q, the manufacturer of the charging system, and requested that they send him some chargers with a revised charging algorithm installed (basically this amounted to a simple software change). “After being cycled five or six times with the new chargers and correct charging profile, the batteries quickly ramped back up to their full rated capacity, further verifying that incorrect charging regimes were the root cause of the sluggish performance,” said Glover.
Bill Glover with Lynne Vincent
To avoid this type of situation again, Glover and Vincent decided to create an off-season charging regimen that would prevent the batteries from their fleet from having this problem again after they have been sitting through the winter months. The process involves:
- Allowing each golf car to run through a charge and checking the state-of-charge in each battery.
- A discharge machine is used to cycle each golf car.
- A constant current charger is placed on the batteries to bring them up to full charge, 1.275 specific gravity readings in each battery cell. This step was done several times to assure the sulfate is completely transformed back into the solution.
“The off-season charging regimen has been extremely effective in keeping the golf cars performing like new every year,” said Glover. “The program has worked to extend the life of the batteries which are now five years old, and the golf cars are still running like new.”
While U.S. Battery recommends storing batteries in a fully charged state, these additional steps have proven to be beneficial to the Congress Lakes Club’s fleet of golf cars. For additional information on battery charging and maintenance tips can be found on the U.S. Battery website at www.usbattery.com. More information on Congress Lakes Club can be found at www.congresslakeclub.com.
