Installed my voltage meter from Scotty today

[erict]

Originally Posted by Down South

That would make sense to me. You would lose the 48V through the harness with a converter hooked to it. You would only have 12V.

Now if you wired the converter up independently and powered the auxiliary devices straight to the converter and left the factory wiring harness as is, then you would still have 48V.

Steve can correct if I'm wrong, but he hooked the 12v output of the converter to the blue wire coming from battery #4 in the bucket which is 12v positive to begin with.

[Stevegrmich]

Someone asked this question, but I can not remember who it was: "Does the 48v at the "hot" side of key switch drop off when cart is placed in TOW mode?"

On my 06 DS, the answer is YES. I just verified it with my DVM. Only have voltage there when cart is in RUN mode.

[longhorngolfcarts]

Did you hook the battey meter to turn off with the key switch, If so you could be getting a false reading due to the resistance in the key switch?

On a precedent you have a orange and black wire in the dash that gives you 48v. then you can jump #3 to the +pos wire, instead of the key switch.

[Down South]

Originally Posted by longhorngolfcarts

Did you hook the battey meter to turn off with the key switch, If so you could be getting a false reading due to the resistance in the key switch?

On a precedent you have a orange and black wire in the dash that gives you 48v. then you can jump #3 to the +pos wire, instead of the key switch.

I hooked up through the key switch. There is about .1V to .2V less due to the resistance of the switch, really not enough to worry about.

[longhorngolfcarts]

FYI, here is a article I ran across in one of my golf cart books.

First let’s talk about what those things are. Some call them charge indicators and some call them discharge meters. So which is it? The market offers two styles of meters to monitor battery voltage. One meter is digital and one is analog. The difference between the two is the analog is basically a voltmeter. The digital meter is more of a battery discharge indicator (BDI). However, during non-use (no load) the meter can tell battery pack charge. But its real value is reading discharge voltage to prevent over discharging the batteries. The value to this is we do not want the cell voltage during discharge to go beyond 1.70 volts per cell. That will be close to 80% discharge of the battery pack. Without monitoring the amount of discharge, damage to the batteries can occur. So, how do we connect the meters?

Analog or Digital will connect the same way. It has always been an industry standard to connect directly to hard positive and hard negative. What this means is connecting as close to the main battery car connections as possible. There are several good reasons for this. One reason is the activation wiring is usually too small and does not truly represent the power side of the system. So connecting to the small activation wiring is not as accurate as connecting directly to the battery pack. Another area of concern is connecting to the key switch. I do not recommend this at all! The reason being is the key switch has resistance. This resistance will give you a false reading. The other reason for not using the key switch is not all key switch circuits are positive voltage. If a key switch activation is desired I suggest utilizing a relay in that circuit. This will allow on/off of the meter if you want to do that. However, it is not necessary to turn the meter off. The draw on the batteries is so low it will not cause battery discharge.