Golf Carting Magazine Issue 14 July 2021

How to Install a Remote Wireless Ignition Key Switch on a Golf Cart

Ryan Fenters is the founder of the popular YouTube Channel called Fentertainment. Ryan creates DIY videos of, in his own words… “dedicated to making, painting, building, modifying and fixing things…”

His golf-cart-related DIY videos are very informative, and we thought it would be a good idea to transcribe them for you for Golf Carting Magazine.

In the latest edition, Ryan Fenters shows us step-by-step how to install a remote wireless ignition key switch on a golf cart.

RYAN FENTERS: Hey guys, what's going on? This is Ryan Fenters and welcome back to the channel. On today's video we're going to get rid of the stock key on this golf cart and switching over to a wireless key. This modification costs around $25 or under so be sure to stay tuned.

So, what we have is the heavy-duty remote control and we're going to use this as a wireless and a keyless switch for the golf cart. Let's open it up and check it out.

The first thing we'll notice is the wireless control switch tells you a little bit about it and how to hook it up which is pretty simple and we're going to go over everything in this video. Now both of these keys have buttons on them that say ON and OFF. So, the “brain” of it is very small as well. The back of it has an antenna and the front has four connections, all Phillips head, and you have the DC

input on the left and the DC output on the right. As you can see it's very tiny and doesn't need to be very big since it only performs one function which is to turn the golf cart in the ON position or the OFF position. This unit will work with 12 volts 24 volts, 36, 48 60 and 72 volts.

We have a lithium-ion battery from www.BigBattery.com and we're going to be putting this into the golf cart very soon. I want to go ahead and use this demonstration as well. Up here at the top you can see the digital display that shows 52.6 volts.

I have the battery turned on and I have my digital multimeter hooked up to the wireless switch and once we turn the wireless switch to the on position, we're going to have a voltage read out here on the multimeter.

Here you can see it reads 52.3 and it reads 52.3 here on the battery as well, so this just goes to show that this little “brain” box of the keyless switch unit does not make and break contact, it just applies the same amount of voltage that you give it anywhere between 12 and 72 volts. So here in front of me you see the Reliance Digital Charge Meter and we're going to be using this for two purposes: number one, this is going to give us a battery charge meter for the golf cart and number two, it is going to be powered ON only when the golf cart is ON and powered OFF when the golf cart is OFF. You can find the Reliance Digital Charge Meter on Amazon.

So, we have the gauge here on the bench and the power and the ground wire here. The ground wire is going to go the ground of the gauge and the power wire is going to go to the power of the gauge. Now on this gauge it has two different powers, one is going be constant and one is going to be ignition. The green is going to be the power of this gauge. Once we apply power to it you can see the red light on the gauge turns on and once the power is removed it shuts off the

gauge. This is going to be very helpful in this golf cart build. Once the golf cart is in the ON position, the gauge will be ON. Once the golf cart is in the OFF position, the gauge will be OFF.

This is not going to have any kind of bright LEDs blurting your face, but you’ll easily be able to see it both in daytime and nighttime.

All right, so in order to install this in the golf cart the first thing we need to do is to access the back of the key panel and it doesn't matter if you have a Club Car, E-Z-GO, Yamaha, or any other make, or model golf cart.

On this Club Car, you need to remove these covers, loosen the hardware and slide the front dash off of the cart.

Now these are both covers and they're easy to lose so make sure to recover both of them. The next thing we need to do is to remove the hardware, and these have two Phillip-head screws that we need to remove. Once you have the screws

removed, we're going to go ahead and slide out the factory dash.

We'll pull the dash out just enough to access the back of the switch. With the key on the OFF position and pulled out of the golf cart, we next need to find out which is the input power, and which is the output power from the switch.

Now in order to do that I've got a voltmeter set the DC at 200 volts. If we set it to 20 volts for example, this being a 48-volt golf cart, it's not going to read it, so we need to go to at least 200. We need to put the black on the ground and the red on these terminals to see which has power to it when the key switch is off. That's going to which is the input power and which is the output power.

We know that the input is this green wire and the orange wire is not showing voltage so I'm going to cut the orange wire because we're not going to use it. I'm only going to use this green wire and this blue wire.

So, the next step is we need to strip the ends back on these wires and add the terminals to them. Now that we have both wires to the terminals connected, we know that the green is the input and the blue is the output.

Now on the control box of the keyless switch I attach the ground wires together by using ring terminals. I have enough wire that I'll use to run back to the main negative of the battery pack. To finish this install we need to connect the green wire to the input power, and we need to connect the blue wire to the output power.

As you can see, I have all four wires connected. I went ahead and put the cover back in place and put some Velcro on the back side of the unit. Now I'm going to mount my unit on the inside of the back-dash panel.

Now it’s time to run the ground wire to the main negative of the battery pack. So, we ran the ground wire here to the main negative of the battery pack. And we’ll connect it using a ring terminal. I use a heat shrink to connect the ring terminal.

When you're placing ground wires on batteries like this, make sure the ground wire for the golf cart goes on first. And all the accessory ground wires go on second.

I went ahead and removed the low-voltage battery meter here because they often go bad in a lot of these older club car golf carts and other golf carts as well. It only has two wires on it. I’m replacing it with the Reliance digital charge meter. The instructions come with a size template that I use to cut out so that the digital charge meter will fit nicely into the dash.

I went ahead and mounted the battery meter and mounted the back piece as well. There’s a black wire, a yellow wire and an orange wire. The black wire is ground. The yellow wire is constant 48 and the orange wire is ignition 48. So, the ignition wire will connect to the key side of the switch, the yellow will connect to the battery side of the switch and the black wire will connect to the ground.

The installation is now complete, and you can see the battery meter is off there's no key in the switch and if you push the accelerator pedal, we are not moving. Now we simply use the keyless remote to turn on the battery meter and we can hit the accelerator pedal and start moving, forward and reverse. Once we hit the off switch, the battery meter turns off and the golf cart is now off. Installation is complete.