[cartboy]

We are now in our second full year with our early RVX fleet.

Another fairly frequent problem, but not fleet-wide, is failure to accept the charger. So the cart does not get charged and then fails on the course the next day.

It is important that the cart barn closer walks the barn and looks at the charger lights before leaving, and that the cart barn opener does the same thing first thing in the morning, as a double-check on the closer and to catch carts that decided not to charge some time during the night. Yesterday I opened and two carts had either red lights or no lights on the charger. In our cart barn I don't trust any cart that I did not unplug myself because of the number of times my cart has failed on the first round of marshalling.

I have been wrestling with carts with this problem, trying to keep them monitored, and trying to determine which ones simply failed to get plugged in one night and which ones have an ongoing problem. I have to put suspect carts in our time out area, and be the only one to plug it in and unplug it.

When I worked with Club Cars, this problem was simple. I had a meter, and a window on the dash, and the meter told me 4 things: Used Battery Life in Hours, Remaining Battery Life in Hours, the status of the last charge session, and something else.

I also used the meter to assess the cart usage, to design a plan of where to take carts from each day to help get equal usage of the fleet.
&, I maintain a Log Book, a page for each cart, to identify ongoing problems and record efforts to resolve them. Yes, I did discover that if you park carts in the same row, or take them in the same order every day, some batteries are going to fail sooner than others. That particular fleet had an entire battery switchout after I left there, before the end of its lease period.

Stuff like that is very costly and an ounce of prevention (paying attention) is worth a pound of cure.

As you might have guessed, I can look at a cart (#) and pretty much tell you it's history.