RV Battery Buyers Guide!

how's it going I'm Jarrod Gillis welcome to another all about RVs today I want to give you an RVs batteries buyers get there's so many different types of styles of our vieng out there that i don't think there's a one-size-fits-all battery for all our viewers so i'm gonna give you a handful of recommendations and who this might be a good fit for so there are some great options out there everything from lithium to just a very simple battery so let's get started and we're gonna start off at the top of the list and we're gonna begin with lithium it is by far the battery with the most amount of advantages out there lithium batteries are for the our viewers that are looking for the the best battery usually with some kind of an inverter and a solar setup because they're going to be the lightest longest lasting most compact takes up the least amount of space most efficient same capacity with a large draw the best warranty no maintenance has less internal resistance so it's like getting an extra solar panel for your solar setup and it can take the deepest discharge repeatedly without harming the battery so you can see why it's gonna be one of the the number one choices for our beers that have the inverter with a solar setup there isn't gonna be another battery on this list that can match all those advantages now on the flip side of the coin there's going to be a much larger upfront cost and i think that's one of the the biggest things about lithium is there's a large upfront cost now they they last extremely long some of these have 10-year warranties some lifetime warranties so it's gonna last a much much longer time than your typical RV battery the second thing that is typically a drawback is you can't charge it when it's freezing but this usually has some pretty easy workarounds for one usually people put the the battery bank inside the RV so it's protected from the cold you can do heating pads but the one thing to keep in mind if you're worried about it freezing is when you use it you can use it well below freezing it actually warms up those cells so once you have that the cell warm up the the temperature sensor in there will allow it to charge because the battery itself has warmed up so you just use the battery and then you can charge it up so between putting it in a conditioned space using a heating pad or using the batteries themselves to warm them up this is easy to overcome now with lithium batteries you have a few options you can build your own batteries which can get pretty involved you can buy used ones and hope for a low cycle count or you can buy a battleborn or the line energy Safari 1300 or you can look at life blue those are a few of the the top brands now my number one pick right now is the lion energy Safari 1300 because it has more features higher specs at a lower price they actually gave me a code to share with you guys so if you wanted to enter in all about RVs you could save 15% off of each batteries so that'll save you $150 off of each one and that's what gives it the the lowest price point compared to the other batteries in this category let's take a closer look at it first off this has one of the longest warranties it's a lifetime warranty so they estimate that this battery will last between thirty five hundred to five thousand cycles 3,500 is extreme use and after that it should still have 80% of the capacity and that's what the lifetime warranty is for number two as I've been running some tests has exceeded its 105 and power capacity when I've been using a space heater on them so a decent sized draw and it's exceeded the amount of capacity that it's been rated for the third one which i think is one of the most impressive things is it can have a hundred and fifty amps out continuous so that means you can have two of these batteries paired with a 3000 watt inverter and the inverter is not going to over draw on those batteries you're not going to be limited by how much your your battery bank can put out so if you have a 3000 watt inverter that's gonna be 250 amps these combined can put out 300 amps continuous you're you're not gonna get backed up by your battery bank and I've tested this too and actually over performed on its promise so the reason why that this is so important is because you can get two batteries so you don't need as big of a battery bank necessary to be able to power that inverter so it becomes a question of how much capacity you would like rather than how many batteries do you need to be able to perform the task of running everything that that inverter is capable of and to top it off it has the smallest dimensions and the lightest weight coming in at around 23 pounds so to wrap it up on lithium I love the battleborn batteries I think the lion Energy is Safari 13 is my top pick for now but they're both excellent batteries so let's move on to the next battery which is going to be AGM this battery is going to be for the rver that still has some kind of solar and inverter setup but doesn't want that big upfront cost that lithium comes with they still want maintenance-free and they're willing to compromise on the size and space to be able to get the same amount of capacity out of their batteries an AGM battery begins us in the the lead-acid batteries so there's a few things that we want to keep in mind but usually you'll look at AGM and gel typically AGM is a little bit more popular for our viewers these are going to be sealed batteries with no maintenance needed for this type of battery so if you look at the things that kill lead acid batteries maintenance won't be the one that kills it on the AGM because we don't have any maintenance on this the other things that that kill lead acid batteries are things like overcharging it discharging it too deeply leaving it depleted too long and excessive heat for lead acid batteries it just brings the life expectancy way down so my pick for a maintenance-free lead acid battery so this is going to include gel and AGM those type of batteries is gonna be the the v-max at $269 for a hundred amp hours batteries Plus also typically has an AGM battery that's very comparable and competitive in price but if we were to look at this v-max and we wanted to build the same battery bank that we had with the lithium the 210 amp hours we would have to have four of these so that would bring us to the the price of one thousand eighty dollars the reason why we picked the battery bank to be that size is because if we look at the chart if we want our batteries to last a thousand cycles for this AGM battery we need to bring it down to only 50 percent and you would do that by having a good battery monitor we've done videos on battery monitors my favorite ones are the the Victor on they're extremely reliable and very accurate but you want to bring these down to 50 percent yes you can bring them down to 75 percent but if you look at the chart you're only going to get 600 cycles out of that so it really depends on how long you want those batteries to last now if you wanted to look at a lower cost AGM you can look at the UB one two one zero zero zero is on Amazon but if you look at the life expectancy if you bring that to a 50% depth of discharge you're only gonna get 500 cycles out of it so it's not even quite half the price but you're gonna get half the life out of it so that's why v-max is my number one pick for AGM batteries now if you still want more out of your battery bank but you're still looking at over a thousand dollars to be able to go AGM just to really have the benefit of being maintenance free then that's usually when you start looking at golf cart batteries and that's gonna be the next one on our list before we dive into the golf cart batteries I just want to do a quick side note on venting for batteries so the thing about lead-acid batteries they have to be vented to the outside so we had a Bay here that had vents to the outside so that none of those fumes would go on the inside of the RV so you can't just put them in a storage bay or inside the RV if you're sticking with lead acid batteries they need to be vented to the outside so we were stuck with just two lead acid batteries that we had for a capacity on this RV the other thing to remember is you want to have a good converter to be matched with your battery so if you're sticking with lead acid you want to have a good multistage converter if you're going with lithium you want to have a lithium charger to be able to get the full capacity out of those lithium batteries you can use a multistage charger typically on those lithium batteries like a battleborn and the lion energy but you're not going to get the full capacity and the most use out of them so it doesn't make sense to spend that much on a battery and not get the the proper charger for your battery so those are just a couple things to remember okay now that we have that little bit of information out of the way let's continue about 6 volt golf cart batteries so this is gonna be for two types of our viewers you're not afraid of maintenance you really want something that doesn't have a huge upfront cost like we're looking at with AGM or lithium but you're wanting a little bit more out of your your battery bank so you can still have a larger golf cart battery bank if you're doing an inverter and a solar setup and you want more out of it or if you just want to be able to have two batteries paired together to be able to get more capacity so that you're not worried about your your heater fan drawing too much and depleting your batteries so you still want to be able to have some more capacity without having to go to a more expensive option now when you're looking at golf cart batteries you have to buy them in pairs because usually they're going to come as a six volt battery and you need to wire them in series when you wire them in series you don't add the amp hours but you add the voltage so you wire the two of them in series to 6 volt golf cart batteries and you get a 12 volt battery bank when you wire them in pairs so your options will need to be in pairs so 2 4 or 6 batteries for a battery bank now moving the golf cart batteries we might have decreased the amount of upfront cost but we've increased the maintenance so now we have fluid levels to check we need to make sure that they're charged properly that they're equalized there's a lot more things involved to getting lower and lead acid batteries so there's more maintenance to be stacked on top of them now my picks for golf cart batteries usually Trojan has been the gold standard in this department but a lot of people have been switching over to the Duracell because of the lower price and similar specs so looking at the price of the Duracell batteries if we were to buy 2 that is around 350 dollars now with a 50% depth of discharge that gives us a capacity of a hundred and seventeen amp hours right around that range so if we were to buy four of them and that puts as a $700 and we have 235 amp hours of usable capacity out of these batteries so in a nutshell the 6 volt golf cart battery is going to give you the the best deep-cycle battery with the lowest upfront cost so let's move on to just the simple most basic battery out there just your your typical RV marine 12-volt battery now this is one that's gonna be for the RV or that really just wants to be able to turn on the lights and have the slides be able to move in and out and you're not asking a whole lot out of your battery typically you're gonna be going to RV parks you're gonna be plugging in most the time but you still want to be able to have that the lights turn on and the slides move in and out when you're not connected to power now you're typically gonna be able to get a battery like this for around $100 it's not gonna do as well deeply discharging it as the golf cart the AGM or especially the lithium but it gets things working and operational in your RV you compare two of them together you're gonna pair them together in parallel so if you have a place for for two batteries and you want to be able to run that furnace through the night or you want to be able to have the lights on and the slides in and out gives you that extra capacity but you're not going to be expecting a whole lot out of your battery bank if you're doing these RV marine 12-volt batteries but like I said if you're our viewer that goes RV parks all the time and that's kind of where you go then this really might be the battery that best suits your needs now a couple of pointers as you're trying to compare batteries side-by-side number one you want to look at the same rated capacity so especially in lead acid you want to look at the twenty hour rate that's kind of the given number for lithium that's still a twenty hour rate but it's not as important if you have a big load on lithium or a small load you're still going to get very close to that that rated capacity on the battery compared to LED acid the more you pull out of the battery the faster you're doing that the less capacity you're gonna have in that batters you want to be able to compare those evenly also you want to look at life cycle of the battery so just for a quick example if we look at that v-max chart if we look at 50 percent and 75 percent on that we can see what we would expect out of the life of it we can also look at another chart and we can see that the temperature and what that is going to do to the life of the battery and how much it's going to deplete it so looking at these charts and being able to compare is really gonna help you make the best decision so if you're looking for any of the batteries that we talked about in this video there'll be links down in the description remember if you use that code all about RVs at Lion energy you can save 15% off of each battery but I think that's gonna do it for today I think that's gonna be a wrap so if you like this video give it a thumbs up and if you want to see more videos about our being hit that subscribe button if we don't see you on the road hopefully we will see you next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: All About RV's

Views: 93,009

Keywords: RV, RVing, RV life, RVers, Jared Gillis, Less house more living, How To RV, DIY RV, Learn to RV, Motorhome, Class A, 5th wheel, RV Electrical, RV Repair, RV America, All About RVs, Learn To RV, RV Knowledge, RV Life, Rv Battery, Lithium RV BAttery, Lion Energy, safari ut 1300, Rv Solar, Rv Inverter

Id: 2BsSWCc66_w

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020