'99 DS, Lacking Oomph

[dabretty]

All -

First, congrats on an awesome forum! This isn't a forum that I previously knew existed until I started looking (for a solution the following problem), but man ... what a cool group of dudes. I can only hope to contribute to this awesomeness going forward.

My issue is that I have a '99 Club Car DS, purchased about a year ago that has relatively new batteries (Oct 2012, as labeled) but still just is having general sluggishness. It's just losing its spunk. The kind of sluggishness that hasn't left me stranded, but rather certainly wondering "am I going to make it home?". It still persists, but any uphill climb is clearly very taxing to this thing.

I just did a voltage test across the batteries, which - if you believe my cheap ebay-purchased battery gauge - is on the low-side at approximately 1/3 of a full charge. Keeping that in mind, at idle (doing absolutely nothing) it shows a voltage of 46.7V. With the rear up on jacks and full throttle (not a real load) it reads 46.0V. Under a real load (going up a hill in my neighborhood) it drops to 43.7V. Doesn't seem like a huge drop, but still somewhat significant.

As mentioned, these batteries are not old (~20 months), which seems to rule out the easy-albeit-expensive-fix (new batteries). I have not dug in any deeper yet, as I'm not sure where to go from here. Is there anything else that I can check out, that might be indicative of what this cart's issue is?

It is currently charging, just plugged it in. I will repeat the same load/no-load test once it's fully charged, although I'm not sure that it will reveal anything new (a 3V drop under load seems like nothing).

Thanks for any help!

Brett