6 volt batterys

dedmiston wrote:

2oldman wrote:

2oldman wrote:

dedmiston wrote:
After being stranded twice in 14 years, I won't ever take that risk again.

How old were your batteries?

OK, since you haven't answered, I'll assume old. Having 1 catastrophic battery failure is extremely rare. Having 2 is almost astronomical odds against.

That's what I'm talking about when people fear a 6v battery failure. Now, if you run them for 6 years, don't water them properly or abuse them at all, then yes, they are going to fail. But that's not catastrophic, that's operator error.

Hey there. I missed your original question.

The first one was almost brand new. One of the connections must have been a little loose and my young (at the time) daughter had overheard me explaining to my wife about the newly installed Xantrex inverter, so she fired up the toaster using the inverter instead of asking me to start the generator. The strong draw from the toaster and what I presume to have been a loose connection caused so much heat at the battery that it overheated the lug and melted it right out of the T-105. It looked like something out of The Terminator. The lug was still connected to the cable, but the whole business was just dangling beside the battery.

Luckily I was able to borrow a battery from someone camped nearby.

Years later, the same thing happened: melted one of the posts clear off the battery.

After that, I stopped buying Trojan and upgraded to four instead of two.

Fluke? Sure. It happened twice though, and my other lonely 6v T-105 didn't do me any good without a partner. The batteries were well maintained though and even if the connection was loose that first time, I always checked to make sure they were tight after that. It's possible that it was user-error, but I doubt it.