Monday, August 26, 2013

[Electric Boats] AGM Batteries?

 


I recently noticed that a number of my deep cycle marine flooded lead acid batteries had been pretty much cooked dry from the Texas sun and the relatively moderate discharge cycles of the Torqeedo motors.

The batteries are Exide batteries, group 27, 160 reserve minutes.  After re-filling the batteries, they would charge, but certainly won't take a load for very long.  The batteries came with a 2 year replacement warranty - and at this point are less than a year old.

I went by the place where I bought them, and noticed they had Exide Vortex AGM batteries (group 24, 100 reserve minutes) on sale for $119.

I pulled two of the most problematic FLA batteries (would take a charge, but at less than 25A were dead in 5-10 minutes), and returned them.  The store gave me a full refund, which I turned around and put toward purchasing two of the AGM batteries to give a try.

I have discovered that "maint. free" deep cycle batteries aren't.  And they can't begin to take the heat of a Texas summer.  However, the power density was ok for my needs.  When they were new, and performing well, I could get over an hour run time out of them at moderate power (though this was still far below the rated 160 minutes at 25A rating!)

Will I get better results from the AGM batteries??

Is it realistic to expect with AGM batteries rated for 100 Reserve Minutes (which I understand means I can run them for 100 minutes at 25A load) that I can actually pull 10-20 amps for over an hour, and then charge them back up on a fairly regular basis?

John

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