Thank you for taking the time to read this article. You honor me and I hope you find the following information useful in two ways. The first is that you will gain a better understanding of the batteries in your golf cart, and in doing so, secondly, you will get a longer-than-expected battery life. Now, let’s learn some useful information about your cart batteries, shall we?

Many times people have had to replace old, faulty batteries that were supposed to be “not that old.” They did not know how to identify the age of the batteries in their golf carts. Weekly, we see the sad faces of people who bought an electric cart elsewhere and were misled or misled when they were told that the cart had new batteries recently when in fact the batteries were more than 4 years old.

Another group of people who need to know the age of their cart batteries are people who have problems with the battery charger not working properly or the performance of the golf cart is lagging. Anyway, have knowledge of the age of batteries are can be a great asset in diagnostics the problem. Regardless of which group you are in, this is how you can identify the age of the battery.

On most golf cart batteries somewhere near the battery post, usually embossed with dot matrix printing or letter stamped you will see a letter followed by a number.

Reading from left to right, the first digit is a letter and the second is a number. The letter is the month of manufacture and the number is the last digit of the year of manufacture. Therefore, in this example, the date code for the battery is September 2013. We know this because the letter is the ninth letter of the alphabet and is equal to the ninth month of the year, which is September. We know it’s 2013 because of the novelty of the battery. If the battery looked old and the sides swelled up, we could calculate it to be from 1993. However, we are using a brand new battery just delivered at the time of writing: 03-2014.

Note that some batteries have a date code on a label that is usually on the side toward the top. Also, there may be multiple layers of battery terminal sprays that will need to be removed to see the code printed on the flat part of the lead post. Be careful not to create a spark when trying anything around a lead-acid battery. Sparks can cause the battery to explode. Unfortunately, this author has seen and experienced it too many times. Again, be careful what you do around the golf cart or any other battery.

Once you know how old the batteries are, you can calculate a number of things related to your golf cart. For example, if you are considering buying a golf cart and want to know how old the batteries are, you don’t have to rely on the seller’s ethics! You can apply the philosophy of the great President Ronald Regan: “trust but verify” to the situation.

Another thing that will help you when you know the age of your golf car batteries is be able to diagnose faulty charging problems. Let’s say you can only drive your golf car for about twenty minutes after charging the batteries. If you have name brand batteries that are less than two years old, then we would probably rule out batteries as the problem and look elsewhere, starting with the golf cart battery charger or charging computer. However, if the golf car batteries are three years old or older, we would first want to check if the batteries are the drivability problem.

So that we can see the main benefits from every golf cart owner who knows the age of their golf cart batteries. I hope this article has been helpful to you in better understanding your golf car, because it is the reason I am writing to help you take better care of your golf car. Check out my blog for more information on golf carts.

MKR