We’re here to demonstrate how you can charge a 36V or 48V golf cart battery bank with a single solar panel using Genasun’s GV-Boost solar charge controller. Unlike most solar charge controllers, the GV-Boost increases the voltage and decreases the current at its output, allowing a single solar panel to be used to charge the higher voltage battery bank.
Let’s say, for example, you have access to a 12 or 20 volt solar panel, but you don’t have enough room on the golf cart’s roof to fit multiple panels to add it up to 36 volts. All you need to do is put the single solar panel on and use the GV-Boost, which will actually charge your 36 or 48V battery bank.
See how altE’s Solar Queen does it…
Charge a golf cart w/ solar panel & Genasun charge controller
Question: With the lower current output, does this mean the charging time will be dramatically increase Do?
Because Watts = Volts x Amps, if you increase the volts, the amps increase, but the power stays the same. So the battery is still getting the same amount of power from the solar panel. Let’s use a 48V battery bank with 200W of panels as an example (rounding numbers to make the math easier).
If we used four 50W, 4A 12V panels in series to make 48V, the charge controller would get 4A 48V into it and the same output. If we used a single 200W 12V panel into it, the charge controller would get 12V 16A into it, and 48V 4A out, same as with 48V 200W in.