What is the consensus on a sealed engine start battery Vs one with caps? I live in a hot climate and was wondering if a sealed battery is the way to go. I have two sealed for the generator which are good and two for the engine which are weak. There is acid visible when the caps are removed. My engine is a slow cranker and I’d like to upgrade to the 1400cca vs the 1150 rated that I have now. There is a FleetPride very close to my house that has the maintenance style 8D’s available for $340 + core.
(05-20-2024, 10:14 AM)BusNit Wrote: What is the consensus on a sealed engine start battery Vs one with caps? I live in a hot climate and was wondering if a sealed battery is the way to go. I have two sealed for the generator which are good and two for the engine which are weak. There is acid visible when the caps are removed. My engine is a slow cranker and I’d like to upgrade to the 1400cca vs the 1150 rated that I have now. There is a FleetPride very close to my house that has the maintenance style 8D’s available for $340 + core.
Too bad you are not close to me, I am getting ready to take out 6 8D's from my house bank to replace with Lithiums. They are 1 year old and have not been used much. We just dry camped for a week at our property in Tennessee and the batteries did just fine. We were not running any big loads really other than the coffee maker. Ran the fridge and a fan all night long without any issues. We generally ran the generator a couple times a day and it topped off the batteries.
By sealed batteries you mean AGM? I have AGM's in my Wanderlodge and it sure is nice to not have to worry about keeping up with the water like with lead acids.
I think my bus also starts a little slow, I think it might be the cable going to the starter. I really do not like the looks of it. I am going to replace it with a new cable and see if it improves. You can check and see if you are getting any loss in the cable with a voltage drop test, put your test lead on the positive on the battery and the positive terminal on the starter and it should be fairly close to zero when starting. You can repeat the test on the negative side as well.
I will replace the terminal clamp connectors as I feel they have seen better days. The battery I was referring to are sealed maintenance free versions of the 8D. I have two. Today I stopped in at FleetPride and they will bring in two 1400CCA 8D batteries for me tomorrow. I have two completely dead 8D batteries I removed with no voltage from the coach last year that were for the house. They got boiled over. My Lithium solar setup is running strong. Thinking of adding another 600a 30kw of lithium batteries.
To emphasize "replacing the terminals" at the engine starter battery. Right after getting our coach I had several "no starter engagement" during engine start. The positive wire coming off the battery (wet cell with caps) had severe corrosion going up into the wire about an 1 1/2" hidden by the heat shrink. I cut the wire back to clean copper and replaced the terminal. Also, at that time I replaced the wet cell batteries (source of the corrosion) with AGMs no issues since!
I tend to spend more than I should... The batteries at FleetPride were $328 each with my account. Supposedly heavy duty 8D-7 series. Should I use the same for the generator which is on the other side of the merge solenoid? I assume charge cycles would be the same even if the generator batteries are lesser CCA's at 1100?
(05-20-2024, 03:13 PM)Latitude 28 Wrote: To emphasize "replacing the terminals" at the engine starter battery. Right after getting our coach I had several "no starter engagement" during engine start. The positive wire coming off the battery (wet cell with caps) had severe corrosion going up into the wire about an 1 1/2" hidden by the heat shrink. I cut the wire back to clean copper and replaced the terminal. Also, at that time I replaced the wet cell batteries (source of the corrosion) with AGMs no issues since!
Yes, the green death gets inside them even with the heat shrink. I use heat shrink that has is adhesive lined, it truly seals the lug connection to help keep this from happening. Luckily we had this in the warehouse at work and we just so happened to have 4/0 locomotive cable so I made all new cables for the Wanderlodge.
Some photos of my old Wanderlodge cables and the new one getting heat shrink.
As to the battery question, I replaced my two un-sealed lead acid engine 8D batteries a year ago with sealed lead acid batteries. The sealed ones are doing just fine. Cleaned out the engine bay last weekend and the battery eye was nice and green on them.
It is nice not having to add water to them, even though they are easy to get to.
I still have un-sealed lead acid batteries for the house side. I rarely run any significant amount of time on just the house batteries so I didn't keep up on maintenance with them like I should have. I checked them last weekend and ended up adding a little over 5 gallons of water to the six, 8D house batteries. Not good. But the batteries have been installed for six years with no issues and still hold voltage good. However, not wanting to wait for them to crash at what would most certainly be an inopportune moment I went ahead and ordered 4 LiFe Po batteries from Epoch to replace them. The new ones are 12V, 460 amp hour. With the deeper discharge ability compared to lead acid, I am almost doubling my usable house battery power.
I decided to go with standard maintenance type batteries mainly since they came in a 1400cca flavor. They are replacing 1155cca batteries which honestly are about 30lbs lighter than the new ones. Crazy. I still have to get the new heavier batteries out of the jeep. I went this route mainly due to the more robust construction. Hopefully I'll get 5 years on these. I'll add another Victron 25 amp maintainer on the new ones to help keep them in top shape all while running off the solar/lithium bank setup. There's the old trick of adding mineral oil to the batteries to keep them from evaporating but I think that's not necessary if they are checked and topped at a regular interval.
