Optima, Gel or AGM, Advertised as both, which is it?

NinerBikes wrote:

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Dang, tplife, I need to borrow your credit card :(

Around S. California, they just borrow your battery, permanently. AZ too, and car registration tags off of your license plate.

Here in SoCal, we mount our AGMS inside the coach (they're rated for precisely that)under the dinette, in a cabinet, etc., farther away from sticky fingers. We use a razor blade, make an X, across the registration tag. They can't take it all and you can have 3/4 and not get a ticket... :)

Probably my bad eyesight :)

In the protocol what was the value of the discharge? I at the c/20 rate? 8 amperes?

I assume full recharging was instituted immediately after 10.5 volts was reached.

Your help will be of great assistance to a lot of people.

Hi MEXICOWANDERER, the cycle defined in that chart is a discharge down to 10.5 volts. The comparison battery used in that chart was a standard group 31 flooded battery.

Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.pinterest.com/optimabatteries

I have been using both red and yellow top optima batteries for years with great success. I have a yellow top that was used for several years in our old camper, moved it to our new camper and used it for one season. It has been sitting unused in the basement for almost a year now. I do not keep a charger on it, I have just been checking it now and then whenever I think of it (usually 3 months or so) and it has never dropped below 12.5v I charge it up and forget it until next time.
Sams club stopped carrying them and now has Duracell agm batteries, so that is what I use now, in both regular and deep cycle, and have been very happy with them. Our tow vehicle, a Yukon XL, has a regular(not deep cycle) Duracell agm and it holds its charge just as well as the optima through the winter months (vehicle is not driven in winter).
I used to have to clean battery terminals every year on both the camper and our other vehicles, sometimes replacing the cable terminals due to corrosion. Since switching to agm's I have only cleaned the terminals once- during installation. No more rotted battery trays or acid eaten wiring harness either. I don't think I will ever go back to a wet cell battery.

its already been quoted

"spiral wound AGM"

BTW IIRC GEL was invented/designed for the space programs and satellites
NASA needed something that would work/stay stable not stratify in ZERO GRAVITY

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Dang, tplife, I need to borrow your credit card :(

Around S. California, they just borrow your battery, permanently. AZ too, and car registration tags off of your license plate.

Dang, tplife, I need to borrow your credit card :(

AGM batteries are designed as drop-in replacements for old-school lead acid batteries, but have so many advantages over them. Gel batteries have their advantages, but are more specialized in their applications. Buying an OPIMA Blue-Top battery instead of a bigger, heavier, acid-spewing maintenance headache is one of the best decisions in camping gear purchases I've made to date, right up there with $500 Sierra Designs tents and $400 Marmot 650-fill down sleeping bags. Their higher cost is only at initial purchase due to longer lifespan and other factors - for me they are turning out cheaper in the "long run" due to quality and their many practical advantages over typical lead-acid batteries.

Comparing Marine Battery Technologies

Thank you for replying. As you probably have gleaned I am a cranky retired lead acid (flooded) design engineer, whose company performed independent cycle life and troubleshooting investigations for several OEM's.

In your chart above am I correct in assuming a 50% DOD. OEM's had nothing but problems with group 31 cycling exercises due to significant issues with acid starvation. Thusly I do not see many non VRB group 31 batteries in the cyclable market place. Love to know if your 31 competition was a Rolls / Surrette :)

Finally your product enjoys a deservedly high reputation amongst the desert Baja Mil, racers because the spiral cell configuration seems to withstand high number G-force shocks with significant advantage over traditional VRB construction.

NinerBikes, the percentage state of charge can vary by battery brand, manufacturer and type. Generally speaking, 12.4 volts is more than 30% discharged for our RedTops (and 34M BlueTop) and more than 40% discharged for our YellowTops and BlueTops (except the 34M).

BFL13, if batteries have become sulfated, our engineers have indicated that cycling them down to about 11.5 volts and fully-recharging them at 10 amps two to three times can sometimes help break up some of that sulfation and restore some performance. I should point out that batteries resting between 10.0 and 11.0 volts tend to be more likely to have a bad cell, as the math typically suggest about 2.1 volts per cell. Take one cell away from a 12-volt battery and you drop into that 10.0-11.0 range. That's not to say that a good battery can't be discharged into that range and recovered, but that batteries that tend to settle into that range after charging is attempted usually need to be recycled.

MEXICOWANDERER, you pretty much hit the nail on the head...if I'm reading your post correctly. For RV applications, the amount of reserve capacity remaining after a battery has been cycled dozens or even hundreds of times is what often matters most, although short of running such a test in one of our labs, most folks won't know until they hit that 300th cycle (if they get there at all). Generally speaking, the shallower the discharge cycle, the longer a battery will last in a given application. In the examples you cited, the battery cycled to 80% DOD will probably not be able to be cycled as many times as the same battery that is only cycled to 60% DOD. What capacity the OEMs expect probably depends on the OEM and whether that refers to the battery manufacturer or the RV manufacturer. This is a chart we use quite often to illustrate the difference between the cycle life of our batteries versus traditional flooded products (note the identical group size comparison).



Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.pinterest.com/optimabatteries