Hurricane season and your golf cart: charge before the storm, test after

September 21, 2026

Two storms in three years put most of Highlands County in the dark. After Hurricane Ian on the evening of September 28, 2022, nearly every resident of the county was without power for at least 24 hours, and about 60 percent were still out the following Saturday. When Hurricane Milton came through overnight on October 9 and 10, 2024, 97 percent of the county’s electric customers, 63,807 of 65,893, were out at noon on the 10th, and 72 percent were still out at 6:30 the next morning. The short version for cart owners: charge the cart fully before the storm, unplug the charger before the power fails, do not run a lead-acid pack to zero during the outage and leave it there, and test the charger before you trust it again when the power comes back. Here is why each of those matters, and what the repairs cost when they are skipped.

What the last two storms did here

Ian’s western eyewall did not reach Highlands County, and the measured gusts were 72 mph at Venus, 69 mph at the Avon Park Air Force Range, and 66 mph at Lake Placid. That was still enough to snap poles along the southbound shoulder of US 27, topple a refrigerated trailer on Placid Lakes Boulevard, and flood streets and intersections in Sebring and Sun ‘n Lake under four to six inches of rain, with traffic lights dark across the area.

Milton was worse for power. The National Weather Service confirmed four tornadoes ahead of the storm, at Venus, Lake Placid, Lorida, and Avon Park, with the Lake Placid tornado rated EF2 at 115 mph. The peak gust was 73 mph at Lake Placid Elementary and the highest sustained wind 61 mph at Avon Park. County crews had hauled 127,820 cubic yards of debris by late December.

None of that is a reason to panic about a golf cart. It is a reason to treat the cart as what it is during an outage: a large battery on wheels that can be genuinely useful, and that can be ruined in a week if it is mishandled.

Why a fully charged cart is worth having in an outage

A 48V lead-acid pack holds a lot of energy, and during a multi-day outage a charged cart does three things a car cannot.

It moves without fuel. When the gas stations have no power for their pumps and the roads are blocked with debris, a cart gets you to a neighbor, to the mailbox cluster, or around a community to check on people. Inside a golf community that is often the only vehicle that can get through.

It is a power source, with care. A small inverter sized for the pack voltage, wired properly, can run a phone charger, a lamp, or a fan off the cart. It cannot run a refrigerator for long, and it must never be connected by clipping a 12V inverter across one battery in a 48V string; that pulls one battery down and unbalances the pack. If you want to use the cart this way, ask us to set up a proper tap before the season.

It keeps the pack healthy. A pack that goes into the storm fully charged sits at the state that self-discharges slowest and sulfates least. A pack that goes in half charged and then sits for a week in a hot, wet garage with no power to recharge it is the worst case for lead-acid.

Before the storm

1. Charge to a full shutoff the day before, while the power is reliable.
2. Unplug the charger at the wall before the storm arrives. The dangerous moment for a charger is not the outage itself; it is the power flickering on and off as lines fail and as crews restore them. Those surges and brownouts kill charger boards. Unplugging at the wall, not just at the cart, is the protection.
3. Water flooded batteries after the full charge, so the plates are covered for however long the cart sits.
4. Park the cart on the highest floor you have and away from the garage door. Ian put four to six inches of rain on the county and flooded streets and intersections. A battery compartment that takes on floodwater is a full pack replacement, and the wiring harness often goes with it.
5. Note the pack voltage with a meter if you have one. A 48V pack fully charged reads around 50 to 51 volts; a 36V pack around 38. You will want the number for comparison afterward.

During the outage: the one rule

Do not run a lead-acid pack down to nothing and leave it. Use the cart, but stop while it still has real charge left, and if the outage is going to run for days, stop sooner. A pack drawn flat and then left flat in a 90°F garage for several days sulfates hard, and the capacity it loses in that week does not come back. If you are choosing between using the cart on day four of an outage and saving a $1,200 to $1,800 pack, save the pack.

If you have a generator, it can run the cart charger, but only if the generator produces clean enough power for the charger’s electronics. Many automatic chargers are fussy about voltage and frequency, and a cheap portable generator can damage a charger board the same way a grid surge does. Run the generator up to speed first, then plug in the charger, and unplug the charger before you shut the generator down. Never run a generator in a closed garage or anywhere near where the cart is charging: a charging lead-acid pack gives off hydrogen, and a generator gives off carbon monoxide, and neither belongs indoors.

After the power comes back: test before you trust

When the power returns it rarely comes back cleanly. Chargers that were left plugged in through the restoration are the single most common storm casualty we see, and the failure is often quiet: the charger lights up, hums, and delivers nothing, or delivers low current that never fills the pack. The cart looks like it has a battery problem. It has a charger problem, and the test at the plug takes two minutes.

The post-storm check, in order:

• Charger output at the plug, measured against what the pack should be seeing. A charger that will not start on a low pack is sometimes fine; a charger that starts and puts out nothing is not.
• Pack voltage and a load test on each battery. Compare against the number you wrote down before the storm. A battery that dropped far more than its neighbors during the sit is the one that will fail first.
• Cables, terminals, and the charge port for water and corrosion. A week of storm humidity in a closed garage is enough to green a terminal.
• Brakes and tires. Debris on the roads means punctures, and a cart that sat for a week with the brake set may have a seized drum. See brakes and tires.
• Lights and signals if the cart runs after dark, since they are required under Florida law for any after-sunset use on a designated street. Details on the street-legal page.

If the cart sat submerged, or water reached the battery tops, stop there and call. Do not plug it in.

What the repairs cost

Every number is from the pricing page, and the $50 to $100 service call is applied toward whatever work you approve. A cart that comes through the storm needing nothing but the check costs you the tune-up and the peace of mind.

Plan it into the season

Hurricane season runs June through November, and the two storms that hit this county hardest came at the end of September and the second week of October. That is also when the summer’s heat has already done its work on a lead-acid pack. A load test in early September tells you whether the pack you are counting on through a storm can actually hold a charge for a week, and gives you time to replace it if it cannot. We are an independent mobile service, and we come to your driveway anywhere in Sebring, Avon Park, Lake Placid, Lorida, and the golf communities in between.