Definitely one single 48v battery as it will be managed by a single BMS that will keep all cells balanced. 4 x 12v batteries is asking for trouble. You have 4 BMS’s all, doing their own thing and your batteries will (not may) become unbalanced. This will reduce your run time more and more over time. When this occurs, The fix is to top balance by fully recharging each battery individually with a 12v charger. But they will then drift out of balance again over time.
More important than capacity is maximum continuous discharge amps, maximum peak discharge amps and the time that the maximum peak amps can be drawn for. Unlike FLA batteries, lithium batteries have a BMS that will limit current to protect the cells. It will disconnect the battery and shut the cart down if the parameters are exceeded. These maximum figures will be dependent upon your carts configuration, but I personally wouldn’t go for anything under 150A continuous and 250A peak for 20 seconds for an unmodified cart.
Choose the correct battery for your cart and you’ll never regret the added initial cost. Performance is so much better, not to mention virtually no maintenance and long term costs will be less as lithium’s should last you at least 10 years.
Cheers
Pat.
Thanks for all your informative posts on this thread.
That's my buggy and the kind of thing I sometimes do to it.
It was a Club Car 6 seater from the factory. The previous owner put the aluminum cage on it. I put a hard top on that and put the Carryall bed on it, along with a (heavy) hitch extension. It has 8 x 6 volt batteries.
It weighs close to 1,700 lbs.
It has a motor and controller from Hi Performance Electric Vehicle Systems, installed by the previous owner. The controller is a Curtis.
It goes almost 35 mph, way too fast for my needs. I'm going to have a local shop try to hook up their computer and tune the speed down on that controller.
While they're doing that, I want to switch to lithium power, shedding as much weight as possible. I don't have much need for range, as it travels less than a mile on a typical day, maybe 3-5 miles on a heavy use day.
I'm going to continue to tow inappropriately heavy things with it, sometimes up boat ramps.
The shop that will work on it doesn't sell lithium batteries, so I want to buy a 48 volt lithium battery pack and bring it to them to make the swap when they tune the controller down.
My question for you and any others with an opinion: which one do I buy?