Golf Cart Battery Testing and Replacement on a 36 Volt Melex .

Hello, welcome back to Charlie's Garage. So I got something new to show you guys today other than the Mustang. We have here a 94 or 95 Melex golf cart. We live in a little retirement community. My wife likes to take this cart, drive it around, take the dogs to the dog park and so forth. Lately it's been a little sluggish. It won't run very well. It has a really hard time getting up a hill. So what we're going to cover right now is how to diagnose the batteries and the motor on this golf cart. So let's take a look at it. All right. So this is a 36 volt golf cart. And if you take a look at it, you can see that we have six, six volt batteries. These batteries are connected to give you 36 volts. So initially when I checked the voltage, it's at 38 volts, which is about what you want to see on one of these. So that means that either we have some corrosion and bad connections, possibly one or two bad batteries that's causing the whole thing not to push out enough amperage, or we potentially have a bad motor. So what we're going to do now is we're going to take these batteries apart or disconnect them from each other so that we can test each battle battery individually. If you look at the batteries, you can see how they're connected to each other like this one right here and like these two right here. So when you're checking for total system voltage on one of these, what you want to do is find the two battery terminals that aren't connected to another battery. So you got your main positive and your main negative for this system right here. And when you run across these two terminals, we're getting 38 volts. We're also getting 38 volts down here at the solenoid. So what we need to do after we check the batteries, clean up the terminals and everything is trace that 38 volts and see if that full voltage is making it to the motor. If the batteries are good and the voltage is making it to the motor, then the next thing that we're going to want to do is test the motor itself. This is a 30 year old almost golf cart. So it wouldn't surprise me if we have a couple of batteries or even a bad motor. So I'll get the testing set up and then we'll proceed from there. All right. So we got this one battery right here disconnected and put the charger on it. These are 225 amp hours at 20 hour batteries, which is a little bit different than people that are used to batteries or used to dealing with cold cranking amps. So you just kind of have to either buy a charger like this one. So you can see right now I've got it maxed out at this charger, 220 amp hours, which is fine. It's charging at 225 amp hours. So I initially hooked it up. We did the test. I'm going to redo it right here so you guys can see it. So we're going to test it right here. It's going to do a quick test, click okay. And you can see right there that it is really failing the test. So after I did that, I took the caps off of all the batteries and you can see that there's fluid in the cells now, but every single one of these batteries, when I took the caps off, there was no water in them. Everything I've read says that if you have a like a daily driver on an electric vehicle like this one, with these types of batteries, you should be checking the water level once a week. And if it's something that maybe you only use for a few hours on the weekends to play around a golf or something, then about once a month, you should be checking this water level. For those of you that aren't experienced at filling lead acid batteries, please do not put tap water in them. There's minerals in the tap water that will cause the batteries to sulfate and cause issues. So you want to use distilled water. Fortunately, distilled water can be bought for about a dollar a gallon on average at most stores, or you can do what I did, which is buy a little bitty distiller because I use it for my humidifier and it distills water for me. Usually about takes about an hour and a half to distill one gallon of water in it. So anyway, so what I did was I filled all these batteries up with water and I'm going to let this charge again overnight. Before I do that though, I'm going to go ahead and still disconnect each individual battery and test them individually. And then clean up the terminals. You can see the one down there is really corroded. It's nice and green. Zoom in on it there. So that definitely needs cleaned up. So we're going to do a little bit of testing, a little bit of cleaning. We'll do that same test I just showed you on all six batteries. And now that they have water in them, we'll go ahead and charge it overnight. And then in the morning, we'll come back and retest the batteries and see what happened. So I'll get back with you when we get to the retest. All right, so it's the next morning. We tested these batteries after they charged overnight. They're still bad. The date code on them shows that they're from 2017. So they're almost five, six years old, which is about the lifespan that you can expect from these unless they're really carefully maintained, then you can get a couple more years out of them maybe. So I just got back from Sam's Club and bought me some replacement batteries, six of them. These are very expensive batteries. These Trojan 6-volt T105 batteries can run you anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 if you buy the Trojan brand. If this is a daily driver golf cart, it might be worth that investment. Since this is a jotting around the community every once in a while type golf cart, I went with Duracells and basically paid half what I would if I had gotten the Trojans. So I'm going to take these batteries out, I'm going to install them, and then I will update you guys on the result. See if we get some power out of this thing. Welcome back guys. So we got the six new batteries installed. I'm going to show those to you now. The hardest part of this whole process is the batteries are really heavy and the space is really tight. So if we take a look at them right here, you'll see how they've been installed. All right, so all six new Duracell batteries are in. You can see how the wiring has been redone just like it was when we took it apart. So some key things for you guys to remember when doing these batteries. Number one, wear proper safety equipment. You don't want to get battery acid on your hands. You don't want it in your eyes. So safety glasses, gloves, everything critically important. The other thing to do is don't trust new batteries to have the proper level of water in them. So always remove these caps. So these Duracells here are removed just simply by twisting this this way and then pulling them off and then you can check the water level inside. You want that water level to be just above those cells like we said. So ultimately with these batteries, we went for a couple of test drives and it's still a slow little golf cart. But ultimately what it comes down to is these little guys right here like this cart, their design max speed is 13 to 15 miles per hour. So it's not like we're going to be cruising. We just wanted to be able to make it up a hill without the battery dying. So hopefully we fixed our problem. So I hope you like this video. I hope it taught you a little bit about how to maintain your own golf carts and I hope to see you guys again in future videos. So please don't forget to like and subscribe to the video and please leave any comments if there's anything else you would like to know about cars, golf carts, or trucks. Take it easy. Bye.