I have a hard time understanding why folks want to complicate their lives with starting batteries. Even Nigel Calder, who shows them in a lot of his diagrams, says they are are really not necessary and add needless complication (which is something cruisers would seem to want to avoid). I have cruised for 25 years--a couple of those years in
Central America, and had only golf cart batteries in two banks and no starting battery. Never missed it. Always cranks up my
engine fine. Golf cart batteries will start most diesels without a problem. I run both my banks together most of the time (I have about a 125 ah
budget on 440 ah of golf battieries) , but--if I ever had a bad cell--which has never happened yet, I could just identify the cell in the bank, isolate it, wait a couple hours and the good bank would recover enough to start the
engine. I am not sure why folks want to complicate their lives with a lot of exotic systems and products that introduce complexity to your systems, and would require significant investigation and
repair parts to keep goin.. Keep it simple and learn the language and mix it up with the locals in the countries you visit. It is a lot better than spending your time trying to
repair a complex system and talking with other cruisers about amps and systems.