Drain in Series?

[nautical62]

When hooking up two 6-volt gulf cart battereis in series, does one need to worry about the issues of a bad battery draining the other as one needs to when using 12-volt batteries in parallel? Will one steal the charge the same way?

What other issues are there with using 6-volt gulf cart batteries. I was thinking of two banks connected separately to a battery switch.

[Rick]

Think of any single cell of being made up of an infinite number or parallel plates infinitely small. Now you can visualize that if many separate batteries of the same chemistry are placed in parallel that is similar. It has been close to 100 years now of combinational series and parallel batteries being used successfully.

Plates can suffer from local areas of contamination which will "drag" down the rest of the same plate in other areas much the same as a salient single battery in a bank can drag down others. There is no valid argument for only series or only parallel as long as one is prudent in making the configuration.

The term "golf cart" does not denote any significant advantage. A particular brand and model is more important.

The disadvantage of a series/parallel -string is that more terminals and interconnect cables are required in a bank than would be for a parallel only bank. This is why most cruising configurations are made up of 12V (for 12V systems) only batteries. The only advantage of using 6V batteries is when a particular battery design physically fits where a 12V battery cannot be found to fit.

[Cheechako]

My understanding was that true golf cart batteries are designed to be drained all day and charged at night. Thus the plates are very heavy duty /thick. You used to get a lot of battery for the buck. Whether that is true anymore and whether or not they are still buit the right way I dont know. There used to be a small battery manufacturere in south seattle that showed me the difference in their shop between the insides of their Golf cart batteries and regular 12v deep cycle (both of which looked excellent!) If I remember right, you can get 4 GC batteries in an 8D foot print... or is it 3?

[nautical62]

Cheechako - Thanks. For some reason I totally spaced out the differences between cranking and deep cycle.