Battery question

pira114 wrote:
Thinking of switching out my normal 12v for a Deka 8A8D. This is for some serious boondocking with minimal charging.

They weigh 158lbs. Other than weight and initial cost, what's the downside? Is there anything else I'm not thinking of?

Other than it seems you don't have a suitable converter (charger) to maintain a battery like this the other factor to consider is what recourse you would have in the event this battery suffered some sort of failure such as a bad cell. Whether it's just one 12 volt battery such as this 158 lb monster you're considering or a set of dual 6 volt batteries you'd be dead in the water, or as the saying goes - up the creek without a paddle. :M A twin set of 12 volt G31 batteries may not offer quite the capacity of that 8A8D lead brick but they'd certainly be a lot easier to toss around and if one should suffer some sort of failure you'd still be able to continue on with the other. This summer I added a 1000 watt pure sine wave inverter to our rig and currently power it with a single G27 but now that it's 7 yrs old the time is coming when I'll eventually have to replace it and rather than go with a couple of 6 volts I think I'll instead mount a twin set of G31s on the tongue, for the reasons I just mentioned.