12 volt battery question please
My batteries are very difficult to remove for winter. Plus I may want to take up ice fishing/camping again!! I am thinking about building hard foam insulation around the batteries to help keep them ...
Forum Discussion
Gdetrailer wrote:
I have a bunch of UPS units around my house, they all came equipped with AGM instead of Gel cells, life of AGMs in "standby use" is far shorter than Gel cells. Older UPS units which came with Gelcells battery life was 5-6 yrs, the newer units equipped with AGMs I end up changing out 2-3 yrs..
I have used both AGM and GEL and I've seen others
Gel is the finikiest eater of any battery out there. You need to be very very very careful charging them.. AGM's on the other hand are gluttons. you can feed them fast enough to "Choke a horse"
(From Xantrex and Lifeline,
Regular Lead acid should be charged 0.30C or slower (C is capacity in amp hours at the 20 hour rate so a 100 amp hour battery eats no more than 30 amps)
Gel 0.25C
Agm.. over 0.2 C used to be 0.3 C but they lowered it And top charge rate easily 2x the minimum (Note with AGM we changed from MAX to MIN charge rate)
I've seen AGM's go 12 years.. I've had 'em last 5, I've never had a gel make it to 2 ANd that was in a system specifically designed to use GEL batteries.
