I have this problem with my electric golf cart. it keeps overheating in certain areas. first it was the cables so we replaced them with thicker braided copper lines. Now it's controllers and other pieces burning up every week. ok.. it's not me.. it's my father burning things up. i'm trying to figure out how to stop pieces from burning up. So far.. my best guess it that one of the batteries is failing so it's causing too much resistance int he line.. which is heating things up.. am i correct? what's a good way to test for this?
This is somewhat complex. A high resistance in a battery will cause the battery to heat up, but will lower the voltage available to the rest of the system. A lower voltage normally means lower current, but motors are non-linear resistance devices. Trying to run a motor on a lower voltage can cause the motor to draw more amperage, which in turn can burn out controllers, cables, and such. To test the internal resistance of your battery, measure the rest voltage of the battery and the voltage under load. The load voltage will always be lower, but the amount of drop will increase as the battery resistance goes up. Compare this to a known good battery under the same conditions. Tom
so driving it untill it's close to dead is probably a really really bad idea.. especially since the resting point is on the top of the hills. (nice climb back up) he only burns up things once the system starts to die... so.. flooring it to get it up the last bigs of hill before it dies. resting voltage is 6volts for all the batteries.. i haven't tested them while under a load. thanks for the input.
