battery fail

[pcvst.tech]

Guys, I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to replace all the batteries in one of our carts here, but before I pull the trigger I want to run these symptoms and results by you all, and get your take on it.
It's a Club Car Carry All 1 with six 8V batteries. The department that uses this cart is notoriously hard on equipment. They drove over a curb or something and mangled the brake linkage. I got that fixed up, but found the cart had gone dead in the meantime, so dead that the charger wouldn't kick on. So I charged the batteries two at a time with an automotive 12V charger...for days. it took way longer to get the voltage up enough to kick the charger on then any other cart I've ever worked with. It seemed that shortly after I moved the 12V charger to the next pair of batteries the last pair would be dead again. Two days of this and I finally got the charger to kick on. The amp meter pegged at max, and stayed pegged all day apparently, since I found it like that at the end of the day when I went to see if I could give the cart back to the operators. The charger was wicked hot, not surprisingly, so I pulled the plug on that. grabbed the specific gravity tester, and found every cell dead, not the slightest movement of the colored discs in the meter. So what gives? I've never seen a bank of batteries act like this, how can this cart even drive?

[cartattach]

Are you sure you don't have something else damaged? It sounds as if you have something sucking the life out of them. If the batteries weren't failing prior to the "incident" in the way they are now, something else has changed. I would call it unlikely that a set of batteries would go to instant fail after having been functioning even poorly but well enough to use.

[scooterman]

sg shouldn't lie, if they are that bad the pack was likely about dead anyway. see if you can disconnect the pack from the cart and put the 12v charger on one battery, make sure it has water over the plates and charge with the 12v charger for a while and see if you get anything out of it. you will need to monitor the charger as to not over charge it but I suspect within an hour if that battery didn't gain anything it is dead.

[glassk]

over a curb or something and mangled the brake linkage

May have caused a short with another wire under the cart