The typical lead acid bank consists of 65-70% of the weight being comprised of “dead lead” or the excess lead you carry around but that you can not use. The term “dead lead” is s term I coined in my electrical seminars. Mainesail nicely expands on the advantage that Two-Rocks asserts, thus:: I'm not jumping on this as a house bank for our boat for the time being (although I've been mightily impressed with the LiFePO4 battery on our Torqeedo outboard), since I've found our existing 6V lead-acid golf cart batteries totally meet our needs while cruising, but long-term I can see going this way once most of the kinks of this new technology are worked out (hopefully by someone other than us!) where he makes this explcity warning "I do not believe LiFePO4 is ready for mass DIY prime time builds." Having slogged through most of that article, I would tend to agree, but it sure looks promising (at some point, at least!). There are tons of discussions and opinions to be found on the web, such as Cruisers Forum and Sailnet suffice it to say that Li batteries do not appear to be a simple matter.įormer C36 owner and boat tech guru extraordinaire Rodd Collins ("Mainesail") has an extremely detailed (of course!) writeup on his webpage here: The system benefits to lithium is hard to beat, although most people don't keep the boat long enough for lithium payback. The cost/benefit for golf cart batteries is hard to beat. Deeper cycling shortens the life exponentially. With lead acid, to maintain the longevity of the batteries, only cycle to 50%. But wait, there's more.partial state of charge is no problem for lithium, no so with lead acid. But it gets better, the charge profiles of lithium are nearly flat - and accept almost all you can throw at them until full. Only using solar (as we do), it's the equivalent of upsizing our panels by 15%. You loose about 15% on the round trip path of electricity charging lead acid. My main reason has do do with usable capacity as well as system efficiency. I plan on going with lithium, but can be more complex. Trojans are very good, but not enough volume here (golfing all year) to find the pricing FL people report. The best value seem to be the Duracell rebranded. Several CANE (Catalina association of New England) members here in the northeast have 6v golf cart batteries and work great. Other than the VacuFlush this is the best change we have made to Shadow. I assumed that after 7 years of use they probably had a lot less than there original capacity left. My first set of these lasted for 7 years and I only replaced them with new Duracells last year before we headed to the Bahamas for the winter. They can be had in either 215 AH or for a little more 235 AH. Better news about the Duracells is that they can be purchased for very little at discounters like Sams Club or Batteries +. I could not fit T105s, but found that the Duracells made by East Penn fit easily. There isn't much room to the top of the battery compartment. You also need to pay attention to the height of the batteries. We solved this by cutting each box in half and then fiberglassing back together so that they were about an inch longer (barely fit into the space under the seat but now each box holds two 6 volt batteries. On our 2000 MkII the fiberglass battery boxes were a little too short to hold the 6 volts. Most of the 4Ds you are likely to find will be starting batteries intended for trucks and busses even if labeled as "dual purpose." There are some instal issues to be aware of. These are not only a lot easier to handle, they are also true "deep cycle" batteries. Change to four 6 volt (golf cart) batteries.
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