wickedinhere said:Here is a pic of my cart with my trailer and 50 gallon tank to water my trees.
I'm not sure I would attempt to add gauges but how hard would it be to add an idiot light that would show low charge? I believe I saw something like that when I was searching for my cart.SPYDERLK said:
Gary, a gauge or gauges will be better than a light. That way you will get an analog feel for the batterys discharge. I did the 3 because I wanted to see the batterys performance relative to one another in order to ID problems sooner. A single would give you fair warning tho. Once your voltage under load with a standard motor goes much below 30 it is time to charge.stump54 said:
Gary. Sorry for omitting this. Charging every nite is a little excessive but not bad. It is not necessary with the deep cycle cells, but the auto charger cycle doesnt overcharge them, .. unless, I guess, the batteries will not rise to the 45V cutoff voltage - - one weak battery can cause this. If the batteries are OK nightly charges will just use water a little faster. If not, nightly charges will use water a lot faster.SPYDERLK said:
Its mainly mechanical. Mount it. Electrical hookup is attaching one wire to each end of the battery string, observing correct polarity. Only two possibilities - if wrong the needle indicates negative - just reverse it and youre done. You always have a visual health check on your batts.stump54 said:
When you say "battery string" do you mean Negitive (-) on first batt in line, and Positive (+) on the last?SPYDERLK said:
Yes. The batteries will be in what is called a series string. Each batterys + will connect to the next batterys -. Like in a flashlite. This adds the battery voltages together giving a battery pack of 36V (6 six volt batteries) or 48V (8 six volt batteries). Hooking the leads of your meter to opposite ends of the pack as you have described, will measure the total voltage of the pack. The voltage will be highest when charging and lowest when running the cart up a hill. For a 36V pack you will see around 45v at end of charge. After charge the voltage will quickly drop to about 40V and then after several hours settle to about 39V. When you then drive the cart the voltage will drop to 36 or lower. Under heavy load climbing a hill it may go as low as 30 even if the batts are fully charged. When you stop tho, the V will jump right back up to 38 or 39. As the pack becomes more discharged you will see this characteristic change. Youll quickly begin to recognize the signs that it needs a charge.stump54 said:
Sort of, but not exactly. You will have to connect to the proper # of batts to give you the voltage needed by the accessory. I believe the ones you mention will turn out to be 12V devices. For them you will only connect across 2 adjacent batteries in the string, rather than the whole string. Some attempt at balancing the load is good when you have accessories that only use part of the string. This is because the accessory causes increased drain on the battery(s) it is connected across. So, you have a situation where for example your cart motor is drawing 20 amps from the entire 36V pack and your lights are drawing 4 amps from just 2 of the 6 batteries. These 2 out of the six are supplying 24 amps while the others are just supplying 20. These 2 batteries are discharged more quickly, therefore they are deader than the others when you start to recharge. The charger connects across the whole pack and charges all the batteries at an equal rate (same amps). The ones that had the lower current drain reach full charge more quickly and then are overcharged for a while before the deader batteries come up to a high enuf voltage so that their contribution summed with the others reaches 45V and the charger turns off. The deader ones havnt quite got a full charge, and the others are overcharged. This is neither terrible nor good, but to be avoided where feasible. If you will be doing a lot of accessory use, like running the radio all day or the lights several hours per charge, you could supply the 12V from different pairs of batterys at different times. That would entail a setup to conveniently move the accessory supply wires from battery to battery at your discretion. This would help prevent the batteries in the pack from becoming mismatched - much in the way tire rotation lengthens the life of a set of tires.stump54 said:
Surprisingly, I think I understand that...SPYDERLK said:
Yes, wiring would be the same for an inverter. However, if you are talking about an inverter to do real work with, you will need a bigger one than a lighter socket can supply. Power = Current X Electromotive force, ie. P=IE - - an easy acronym. So, for a typical 400W hand drill - - 400 = Ix12, I = 400/12, I= 33 Amps from the battery pair you are using to supply the inverter. Youll notice that since you are using 12V to produce 120V you must supply 10x the current. A reasonable rule of thumb would be to multiply the nameplate amps on the appliance by 11 to account for the inefficiency in the conversion. You draw about 11x the nameplate amps from the battery.stump54 said:
