Had installed a couple Big Battery 48V Badger units for my mother's golf cart to save her the hassle of dealing with water levels etc. once my father passed away. I had been happy with their overall performance but ran into an issue when the cart went unused for a while and when I checked on it the batteries were well below their advertised low voltage cutoff (26.6V vs 36V) level but the BMS had still not kicked in yet.
Returned the batteries for testing and was told they were fine with no explanation for the behavior so I returned them again and was just informed that unless the BMS has a minimum draw of 3A the low voltage cutoff is not enabled. Because these are small packs you have to use at least 2 in parallel so that means anything below 6A will bypass the low voltage safety of the BMS. This seems to be a terrible design because even if you had old halogen headlights/taillights you wouldn't cross the 288W minimum load for the BMS to do its job and battery damage would result if the headlamps were left on accidently.
Will definitely be checking out other solutions in the future that do not have this vulnerability due to the intermittent nature of this cart's use.
Returned the batteries for testing and was told they were fine with no explanation for the behavior so I returned them again and was just informed that unless the BMS has a minimum draw of 3A the low voltage cutoff is not enabled. Because these are small packs you have to use at least 2 in parallel so that means anything below 6A will bypass the low voltage safety of the BMS. This seems to be a terrible design because even if you had old halogen headlights/taillights you wouldn't cross the 288W minimum load for the BMS to do its job and battery damage would result if the headlamps were left on accidently.
Will definitely be checking out other solutions in the future that do not have this vulnerability due to the intermittent nature of this cart's use.