To charge or not to charge.... wtf is the question?

[Pipsta]

Originally Posted by adiexp

hi
not sure if I can help but looking at what you have said I would try and change the battery for a new one. I now you said in previous posts you had fitted one, but was that before or after you had the trapped cable incident. If the battery was fitted before that then it could be damaged. So not holding a full charge and causing your S/G not to give out the correct charge voltage. A good charged battery should hold a charge above 13 volts or more even after it is stood for a while. If like on mine with a faulty battery due to a wire shorting out and holding a voltage of 12.7 the generator would only give out 13 and not 15v plus that it should do. It did not charge fully so I charged the battery (seemed OK) re fitted then the longer I used it the worse the battery got. I had the battery tested and was told it was faulty so fitted a new one and the problem went away and been ok since.

Good luck
Adie.

PS Which area do you shuttle people about.

Yea the battery is new and I'm not sure if I damaged it any. I got 3 year free replacement so if I did it's easy to go swap it at the store. Seems like the battery is holding a charge well enough, though. But after running the cart, lights included for up to 5 hours with no help or recharge from the charging system it gets discharged and I have to pull it to recharge at home on a charger

[Pipsta]

Originally Posted by adiexp

hi
Good luck
Adie.

PS Which area do you shuttle people about.

Oh, by the way, I live in Phoenix, Arizona. I won't get rich shuttling people around. Just wind up paying the bills. Keeping the cart going might be more work than it's worth in the end. We'll see.

[Pipsta]

I bought a volt reg and was going to put it on. Decided to drive it one more night and vest the voltage after it heated up at various spots maybe finding if I actually needed this part replaced.

The cart up and died on me about 15 mins into driving it. Buzzing along fine and it stalls, which has happened before and typically I just turn the ignition key off and then back on and it restarts, and it does it again this time. I notice the headlights are out though I'm not sure if it's right away cause of the streetlights are bright on at the spot of the restart but I turn a corner within 20 seconds of the stall and restart and it's dark. I pull over to check on it and when I take my foot off the pedal the cart goes quiet. No starter/generator running or anything. I try to start it and no power, no nothing. No starter/generator cranking. Check the fuses and all are good.

It's late at night so I tow it back to the garage and in the morning I will trace down the electrical path to find where the power ends. Anyone have an idea of what this sounds like before I get out there to my cart?

Would a solenoid going bad cause this to happen? Kinda slowly going out effecting battery charging and then *poof* no good all at once?

[reinventions]

I have a couple ideas for you.

Still kind of sounds like a bad connection given the sponteneity of the dropping-dead, so you might be on the right track with the solenoid. I don't know if I'm looking at the right diagram but seems like the battery positive distribution for the key switch, etc. is at the solenoid, so check those connections. An ohm meter on either side of a connection (battery disconnected) and wiggling it around gives it away sometimes. Same thing with your key switch... I'd start looking for bad wires in strategic places. Doesn't seem like there's a whole lot that can stop one of these things short of grounding out the wire that goes to the RPM limiter, so you could try disconnecting that as a test to see if it makes the difference between running and not.

good luck.

[jiminpa]

do you run extra lights? do you spend much time waiting between customers with the lights on but the cart not running? maybe this is a candidate for re-wiring to run when the key is on, that way you would not loose ground on the battery as you waited for your next customer. Sounds like this could be a fun job if you could keep your cart running.