AGM batteries - are they better?
Upgrade to an AGM battery. You can safely mount them inside, and upside down, and they will out-perform any flooded battery you ever owned! Here's a quote from another thread. It's typical of other...
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... pay the extra money on AGMs to get that extra couple of minutes of quiet time.
Personally, if I was in that concerned with generator noise I would be camping in places with electric hookups. After all whats the point of dragging a long a big expensive RV out into the wilderness with a big screen, DVD/Blue ray, surround system, PC, cell phones, game system and any other electronic gadget if you are not willing to put up with a generator for a few hrs per day?
A lot of people are not willing to put up with a generator, so they don't drag all their shore life toys out into wilderness. Believe it or not, being warm and fed often can be enough to feel well. For an adult person, anyway.
Back to the point - I agree that very few AGM have extremely high charge acceptance rate. Lifeline has 5C max rate. Still, most other AGM have 0.3C.
Flooded - I don't know, seems that nobody cares :), though Trojan recommends 0.1C-0.13C. This is ~2.5 times slower than average AGM, so this is not "minutes". But, like I said, nobody cares about exceeding those rates with flooded, especially weekend warriors, their GC will last many years no matter what rate.
To me the advantages of AGM is the ability to keep them inside, like under-bed storage, and the ability to store for 8-10 months or longer - depending on temperature - without maintainer. Flooded would drop below 40% in 6 months. The watering-free feature of AGM is incidental to me. When you have to store it for more then 6 months without being able to check it, this means that there is no watering or any other maintenance, with or without 120V maintainer, because you don't know if maintainer even works during that time.
