48v or 54v?

vagabond

Maybe a wild hair, but I've been thinking about going to 54 v using 7 8v batteries. The cart is a 96 txt sepex I'm going to have to upgrade the motor and probably go to the altrax 500 I also need to replace the wiring as it is totally screwed up.
I dropped my cart down to 36v and gave it to the wife, her cart motor was in pieces when we got it and the housing where the brushes are has some pieces missing from the housing, the cart was a freebee so I'm just going to be out the money for parts.
Just wondering what the brain trust here think about the idea of going to 54v instead of 48v

BGW

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gornoman

Do you have a 54v charger, solenoid, and controller?

benjylafond

Isn't that 56V?

scottyb

Everything gets more expensive above 48 - basically you may as well go 72v cause you can't find a 56v charger and you have to buy 72v controller to run anything above 48.....

Volt_Ampere

Yes. The math I learned is 7 * 8 = 56. If I were you, I would not bother to up the voltage.

jakesnake27

Just go 48v, that's what all the peripherals are set up for...

vagabond

I said a wild hair idea
at 48v all I'll need is 6 8v batteries and and a motor and the the wire loom, or I'm going to have to spend some time reworking the loom and making new battery cables.
It was just a thought

rbuggies48IN

I suggest you stay at 48 volt unless you are desperate for roughly 12% more speed and torque, as previously mentioned, you set off a firestorm of issues as 54 volt falls into the abyss of controller, solenoid, charger, motor, etc. etc. changes. However, I had the same wild thought regarding going to 60 volt by adding one 12 volt battery. During this odyssey, I found the charging issue the most challenging as there are no standard chargers between 48 volt and 72 volt. I was therefore going to use my car battery charger on the 12 volt and charge the 48 volt system separately with my existing charger. I ran this up BGW forum and didn't get any positives. I did check with my motor re-builder and my controller re-builder and they stated they could handle the 60 volts - I also got one response on the controller telling me since my bats reach 63+ volts when charging, the controller should be OK. The solenoid I have is a 48 volt HD. I was told this is OK as long as you energize the coil with 48 volts and not the full 60 volt pack? I would also have to monitor the 12 volt separately , because this would be the limiting factor for run-time. I was interested in getting some more speed and only go through the manual cable changes when the situations/moments of fun would dictate. I have modified my 7th battery tray to accept the 12 volt battery, but still doing more research as I am no expert on this. The modified tray may be used for a separate 12 volt power source vs. the bat pack.

sportcoupe

Fully charged 8v battery is 8.49 so 7x8.49v = 59.43, sounds doable under an Alltrax since the max is 60v but there is a major problem, the 8v battery will charge way past 8.49v during charging. It will settle down 12 hours after charger cuts off but who wants to wait 12 hours off charger just to drive cart.

As mentioned, going higher then 48v on FLA batteries and you may as well go 72v. It's expensive though.

vagabond

I'm going to keep it at 48, when I had the cart I gave my wife at 48 the top speed was 31.8 mph with the windshield off and the tires were 205/65/10s.
Hoping with the 8v batteries and a motor upgrade I can hit somewhere between 35 and 40 mph, originally running 8 6v batteries

wasn't thinking about a charging system when I thought about going to 56v
just another senior moment