My wife and I recently became full time RV'ers. We almost immediately developed a dislike for the expensive RV parks and instead go boondocking in the Cities and National Parks. Our generator runs good but eating up .5-.8 gallons of gas an hour causes us to only use it for cooking. We did however pick up a brand new 110 pound hybrid battery. It can run our two laptops for about a day and a half before needing to get recharged. It'd be great for it to also handle a LCD screen and run 3-4 days.
Hybrid We must of paid $250+ for. AH is 6.5 amps at 25 hours.
http://www.interstatebatteries.com/cs_estore/content/product_info/marine_f.asp
Mine is the SRM-4D at the bottom of the first column.
I'm eyeing a Gel Cell with 31 AH. (measured at 20 hours?)
http://www.batterystuff.com/batteries/rv-marine/gel-cell/8GU1.html
If I understand this right... Which I probably don't. The Gel sell battery is almost 5x stronger than the hybrid???! This is confusing to me since both websites use different measurements of power. It couldn't possible be that much stronger, especially at nearly half the weight - but that's all I can come up with.
There's no more space in the Engine for a third battery (first is the car battery for turning on engine.) So I'd probably just stick
the Gel in the Cab by the front seats and hook a converter up to it. The annoying thing with this setup will be needing two separate chargers
for both batteries. But small price to pay for not running our generator 8 hours a day.
Hybrid We must of paid $250+ for. AH is 6.5 amps at 25 hours.
http://www.interstatebatteries.com/cs_estore/content/product_info/marine_f.asp
Mine is the SRM-4D at the bottom of the first column.
I'm eyeing a Gel Cell with 31 AH. (measured at 20 hours?)
http://www.batterystuff.com/batteries/rv-marine/gel-cell/8GU1.html
If I understand this right... Which I probably don't. The Gel sell battery is almost 5x stronger than the hybrid???! This is confusing to me since both websites use different measurements of power. It couldn't possible be that much stronger, especially at nearly half the weight - but that's all I can come up with.
There's no more space in the Engine for a third battery (first is the car battery for turning on engine.) So I'd probably just stick
the Gel in the Cab by the front seats and hook a converter up to it. The annoying thing with this setup will be needing two separate chargers
for both batteries. But small price to pay for not running our generator 8 hours a day.