Battery question

[Duane King]

All of my posts have been here in the electrical forum because I am bogged down trying to buy what I need to wire my trailer. I still haven't ordered any lights.

But. . . on to my battery question. After reading lots of stuff about batteries I thought I would find lots of choices. But two battery suppliers in my small town directed me to the same type of battery.

I'm looking at an open cell, type 24, deep-cycle, marine/RV battery. Interstate Batteries has a medium range battery that is the biggest I can buy for the space I have available. Here are some of the specs on this thing. None of this makes any sense to me. Part#SRM-24. CCA is 550. MCA is 690. RC is 140 Hours at Ampere Load: 5 amps 17.2, 15 amps 5.1. Warranty 12/30.

The salesman says this is the type of battery they put into tent trailers and I should get 2-4 years of service if I maintain it. They want $59.00 for it.

Waddayathink?

Duane

[EZ]

Duane,

There are a lot of folks here who know more about batteries than I do, but it sounds to me like this is a "combo" battery, used for starting outboard motors and also running lights and live wells. On a true deep cycle battery there are no Cold Cranking Amps (CCA) or Maximum Cranking Amps? (MMA) specs. Those are motor starting specs. It should just give a spec for Amp/Hours. You will get the most juice and longest life in a tear with a true deep cycle battery. Mine is rated 75 amp/hrs for about $40 from Walmart.


Ed

[bdosborn]

I went to their website to look up some specs and its kind of hard to compare capacity since they don't publish a 20 hr rate for amp-hrs, which is the number that is most commonly used for comparison. But the 25 amp rate is 138 minutes and a Trojan 24TMX is 140 minutes. It also weighs about the same; 46# versus 47# (so it contains about the same amount of lead) It seems to compare to a good quality battery. True, it is a marine/rv battery instead of a deep cycle, but deep cycles are getting expensive and hard to find. For the price it seems to be worthy of consideration. If you buy it, keep it watered and charged and let us know how its holding up in a year.
Bruce

[madjack]

Duane...you need to get an Optima D31 to go with that power panel ya got...ya don't want it to feel out of place dooya...........
madjack