Hello,
Our
boat came with two new GPL-4DA
Marine batteries that have never really performed well at all. I suspect maybe they were "flat" from the get go. We have found doing anything simple, even just having the lights on drains them extremely fast. They just do not seem to hold a charge and drop really fast below 12v. In once case they fell to 10.3v overnight with almost nothing on. That morning we rushed to get
shore power and left them
charging with the built in
charger (also came with the boat) for nearly 24hrs. They seemed to recover only to their former lackluster self.
We now have a
wind generator going and do not let them go below 12v. However they have almost no ability to deliver
power for more than a couple of hours under what I'd call very light loads.
These appear to be very expensive and good
batteries (wired parallel for 12v bank). It's a
lagoon 410s2 and there are also starter batteries wired into this system although I'm under the impression they are somehow separated from the house bank somehow. The
boat (ex-charter) came with zero
manuals of any kind. When the batteries went low the first time we asked the seller who said they ran the engines 3hrs a day and suggested we do the same. Hence the Sunforce 600W
wind turbine was added. We do not want to become a
diesel power plant for 3+ hrs a day or we'd have looked into power boats from the get go
I read a while back about batteries something about dead is not always dead. They are either sufided up or just in need of conditioning
charging. Unfortunately for us our Sunforce
MPPT controller kicks off at 15v the voltage Lifeline says I need to maintain for 8hrs to condition them.
Before I spend more
money trying to condition charge these batteries can anyone help me understand what options I have? These seem fairly common batteries in a fairly common arrangement. Our friends who bought their ex
charter boat when we did have the same batteries. They have a
solar panel setup with a controller that will do the conditioning charge (fortunately for them as their batteries are outperforming ours but below their expectations).
Also, if anyone is considering the Sunforce 600W
wind turbine be advised that's only 600W with 24v
battery setup not 12v. It's advertised a bit misleadingly as 600w but they fail to mention you'll only see 400w if you have a 12v system.