November 21, 2019
Out with the old…
And in with four new Trojan T-105 six volt, flooded-cell batteries, just like the ones that came out (well, cleaner and hopefully working better than the old ones!).
I set a Google alarm to remind me each month to top off the battery water. The last few months, the battery water required has been very uneven and getting worse each month. I disconnected the batteries to measure the voltage of each individual battery and noticed it was also getting pretty uneven.
As these batteries were five years old, I’ve been on the fence as to what to do about it. Five years isn’t bad, but they’ve been well cared for and I would have liked to get seven years of service. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to start fighting battery failure issues. I tried to equalize the batteries to coax some more life out of them but that was unsuccessful. Two batteries would not reach the 15.8 volts required to equalize them, at least with the small AC charger I have. The batteries were heating up and while the electrolyte specific gravity was climbing, the current wasn’t going down, nor was the voltage rising. I gave up. New batteries.
I get what Cyndi calls my hobbies. My most recent hobby was researching batteries and after looking at a lot of options, here’s what I decided was and wasn’t right for us.
1. AGM Batteries: AGMs require a 100% charge at least every third cycle (Lifeline AGM manual), otherwise, they suffer premature failure. With our increased solar capacity we can and do regularly charge our battery bank to 100% but I am still uncomfortable spending twice the price of flooded batteries on batteries that might only last two years. What if we go through a long cloudy period? We’d be running the engine a lot to get to 100 percent.
2. Lithium Ion: While I know quite a few boaters have installed them, I still feel like the lithium ion battery bank I’d want to install is not yet available (or not yet available at a price point I can justify to myself). Maybe in five years?
3. Flooded Lead-Acid: They’ve worked well for us. I found Trojan T-105s for about $200 USD each here in Christchurch. These are American made batteries with a good reputation. I installed my first set of T-105s in a cabin cruiser I owned over 30 years ago. I decided to go with these again, and by the time they’re ready to replace, maybe lithium will be a more attractive option for us.
Note: We’ve been having trouble with the carbon monoxide detector being triggered by hydrogen from the charging batteries and that was one of the reasons I looked so hard at the other technologies. It might be that the problem with the old batteries was causing excessive gassing. So far, with the new batteries, no alarms! Fingers crossed that this continues. (Who knew that a CO alarm could be a battery state of health detector too?)
-Rich
