As the winter season approaches it’s important to prepare your golf car’s battery for colder weather conditions. Depending on how severe the weather gets, golf cars can either go into complete storage to ride out freezing temperatures or still be used on occasion if the temperatures are not as severe. In either case, preparation is key to the longevity of deep-cycle batteries.
If your golf car is going into storage, make sure that you properly charge the batteries before doing so. Leaving them discharged in freezing conditions is a common mistake that allows the electrolyte to freeze, causing it to expand. Electrolyte expansion can crack the battery case, causing a leak or complete battery failure. Most of the time it’s not noticeable until temperatures begin to warm and you find puddles of electrolyte on the ground around your golf car. A fully charged battery has a freezing point around -80 °F while a discharged battery has a freezing point around 20 °F. By keeping the battery fully charged during the winter months, the electrolyte is less likely to freeze.
If the weather is not so severe, and there are days where you can occasionally use your golf car to get around, it’s important to know that colder temperatures slow down the rate of battery charge and discharge. The problem with this is it may seem like your golf car batteries don’t have the same capacity as you may be used to. Cold temperature increases the resistance in the battery’s chemistry and causes a reduction in battery capacity. A general rule of thumb, for every 15-20 degrees below 80 °F, the battery loses 10 percent of its capacity.
Problems can also occur if you simply plug in our battery charger and let it go through a complete cycle, without checking to see if they are indeed fully charged. As a result of slower charging and the batteries not receiving a full charge, batteries could go beyond the recommended maximum of 50-percent Depth Of Discharge. This can shorten the life of the batteries and leave you wondering what went wrong by springtime.
To know if you’re batteries are fully charged when the ambient temperatures are much colder, take hydrometer readings of your battery’s cells and use the correction factor. The optimum temperature to take a hydrometer reading is 80 °F (27 °C). As a rule of thumb, subtract four points (.004) from your hydrometer reading for every 10-degrees below 80 °F (5.6-degrees below 27 °C). For example, if the electrolyte temperature is 50 °F and your battery-specific gravity reading is 1.200, you must subtract .012 from your reading. In this case, .004 for every 10-degrees equals .012. Subtract this from 1.200, and your corrected specific gravity reading is 1.188. In this example, the battery cell is less than 50 percent charged and should be re-charged before being put into use or winter storage; (a fully charged battery should read approximately 1.270).
The ability to check specific gravity readings in flooded lead-acid batteries is a great advantage for cold weather operation. It allows the operator to understand the effects of cold temperature on the batteries. While the downside of storing or operating golf car batteries in the winter requires regular specific gravity checks, one positive aspect is that colder temperatures also reduce self-discharge rates. In the long run, taking the time to check the state of charge on your golf car’s batteries will ultimately be more cost-effective
than having to replace one or more damaged batteries. To find additional resources on battery maintenance and ways to increase battery efficiency and service life, visit U.S. Battery’s website at www.usbattery.com.
