8 volt battery issue

[lanestephens]

I've got a 48 volt Club Car with Trojan batteries. The cart is an 03 and I purchased in 08. I'll admit I haven't treated the batteries the best, so may be looking at a new set of batteries, but before I do that I wanted to ask a question. I hooked up my general purpose battery charger to each battery today, and all of the batteries read 7.9 ot 8.0 volts, with the exception of one which read 5.9. Could it be that individual battery has gone bad and the others are still okay? My Club Cart charger would not kick on, but I had a bit of acid build up on a couple of the connections. I cleaned that, put my battery charger on each battery, saw the low 5.9 reading on that one, so put it on a direct regular charge for abut 3 or 4 minutes. This got the reading up to 8.3. With this, I then hooked up the cart charger and it started functioning properly. When fully charged, the car does not run for long. So again, I may be looking at buying a full new set, but just have to wonder about that one battery reading so much lower than the others. Thoughts?

[scottyb]

I trust you checked the water levels in all the batteries? The weak one is the first to die. Replace it with a used battery and see how much longer you can go.... with regular maintenance and frequent recharging...