Thank you for taking the time to read this article. You honor me and I hope that you’ll find the following information helpful in two ways. The first is that you’ll gain a better understanding of your golf cart’s batteries and in doing so, secondly, you’ll get more than the expected amount of service life from your batteries. Now let’s learn some helpful information about your cart’s batteries, shall we?
Many times individuals have had to replace old and bad batteries that were supposed to be “not that old”. They did not know how to identify the age of their golf cart batteries. Weekly, we see the saddened faces of people who bought a electric cart elsewhere and were misled or down right deceived when they were told that the cart had recently new batteries when in actuality the batteries were over 4 years old.
Another group of people that need to know the age of their cart’s batteries are individuals who are having problems with either their battery charger not working properly or the performance of the golf cart is lagging. Either way, having the knowledge of how old the batteries are can be a big asset in diagnosing the problem. Regardless of which group you are in, here is the way you can identify the age of the battery.
On most golf car batteries somewhere near the battery terminal post, usually engraved in dot matrix print or stamped in letters, you will see a letter followed by a number.
Reading from the left to the right the first digit is a letter and the second is a number. The letter is the month of manufacturing and the number is the last digit of the year of manufacturing. Hence, in this example the date code on the battery is September of 2013. We know this because the letter is the ninth letter of the alphabet and equates to the ninth month of the year which is September. We know its 2013 because of the newness look of the battery. If the battery looked aged and the sides swelled out we could calculate that it is a 1993. However, we used a new battery just delivered to us at the time of writing this article: 03-2014.
Please note that some batteries have a code date on a sticker usually found on the side toward the top. In addition there may be several coats of battery terminal sprays that will need to be removed to see the imprinted code on the flat part of the lead post. Be careful not to create a spark when attempting anything around a lead acid battery. Sparks can and will lead to the battery exploding. Unfortunately, this author has both seen and experienced it too many times. Again, be careful what you do around the golf cart or any other battery for that matter.
Once you know the age of the batteries you can calculate several things concerning your golf cart. For example if you are contemplating purchasing a golf cart and want to know the age of the batteries you won’t have to rely on the seller’s ethics! You’ll be able to apply the great president, Ronald Regan’s philosophy:” trust but verify” to the situation.
Another thing that will help you when you know how old your golf car’s batteries is to be able to diagnose malfunctioning charging issues. Let’s say you can only drive your golf car for about twenty minutes after charging the batteries. If you have brand name batteries that are less than two years old, then we would probably rule out the batteries being the problem and look elsewhere starting with the battery charger or the golf car’s charging computer. However, if the golf car’s batteries are three years of age or older, then we would want to first check the batteries for being the drivability issue.
So we can see the major benefits of every golf car owner knowing how to tell the age of their golf cart’s batteries! I hope you found this article helpful in your understanding of your golf car, for helping you better take care of your golf car is the reason I write. Check out my blog for more great information about golf carts.
MKR
