What kind of Batteries do I need for my Boat? Marine batteries explained!

hey guys what's going on welcome to another episode of dan rashard fishing and today we are gonna be talking about batteries one of the questions I get on one of my most popular videos that I've ever done on the channel which was how to properly wire up a 24 volt trolling motor to your battery system one of the biggest questions I got was what kind of batteries do I need good questions so today we're gonna talk about what kind of batteries do you need which ones to buy what size what are the different technologies and all that good stuff so stay tuned if you want to know more about batteries and of course I would love it for you guys out there that know your battery needs and you know what what kind of brands are use post a comment tell me what do you use how do you use them what size you guys have on your boats what are your favorite brands maybe some some of the stories horror stories you had with other batteries and if you haven't of course any comments be sure to post your comments let me know if you have any questions if you have any questions about what you're gonna see in this video or any other electrical questions about your boat post them and I'll try my best to answer them also bear in mind that down below in the description I will have links to everything we're going to talk about so the battery brands battery companies any other products for maintenance or for installation any products that we talk about you can just scroll right down into the description below and you'll see I'll have links for everything there ok so let's start off with the very basics all right let's do it let's get the party started with the very very basics the question that I've heard many times why can't I just use a regular car battery well you can technically you can use a regular car battery but there is important differences you need to understand between a car battery and a marine or RV battery the some of the smaller differences is that on a marine battery like these guys here come on over here I'll show you come on you can see over here you've got two different kind of terminal posts you've got the standard one that you'll see on a car battery that is only on a car battery on a marine battery you've also got the screw in post like this where you can screw down accessories that are not on those big giant terminal heads okay so that's one of the big differences right there another big difference is simply in their construction you see car batteries are made purely for cold cranking amps there they're out put as much amperage as they can to start car your vehicle especially in cold weather they're not made for prolonged use without some way of recharging you see every time you start your car and it's running it actually recharges your your battery whereas on a boat the engine does do that but when you're using trolling your trolling motor and stuff like that nothing is recharging you're just drawing so marine batteries are made not only for cranking power but we also have deep cycle batteries which are for prolonged discharge at high rates for a long amount of time you know these batteries need to be able to power your trolling motor for 10-12 hours without dying no car battery will ever do that so very important that you understand that you can technically use a car battery but you're gonna be in for a world of hurt when it comes to running any of your accessories for a long period of time another big difference is that the components used in a marine battery tend to be more robust they're built thicker stronger to take a beating you know while a car is constantly moving it has a very good suspension it's a relatively smooth ride whereas your boat is getting hammered and beaten down pretty hard so it's important that the battery has that more rugged construction to handle those kind of those kind of demands all right so listen with that out of the way let's talk about the first thing you need to consider when you're going to buy a battery for your boat you need to consider the application what are you using the battery for there are two main kinds of battery okay there are cranking marine batteries which is a hybrid between a cranking battery but also to run smaller electrical accessories for a long period of time such as your electronics or are you looking for something that needs requires a lot of draw a deep cycle battery and that would be for your trolling motor ok so important to understand am i powering my electronics is it the power the motor on the boat or is this the power my trolling motor so if you're looking to buy something for your trolling motor you're looking for deep cycle batteries and if you're looking for something to for cold cranking amp and running smaller accessories you're looking for a starting battery okay so it's important to make sure you keep that in mind so identify which kind of batteries you need for what and then you can start looking into the technology and you might ask yourself what's the difference between a cold cranking battery and a deep cycle battery they look kind of the same this one's a lot bigger but they look pretty much the same what's the difference well the deep cycle is actually designed for better discharge rates okay and the way they do that is the plates that are inside that I guess create the ionic charge they're a lot thicker so it's made to last a lot longer but has less cranking amperage does that make sense so that's why it's important to distinguish between the two they also tend up because of those thicker plates they will overheat a lot less the batteries do get hot especially with heavy use so with heavy sustained use those extra plates allow the battery to not overheat and possibly cause some serious problems on your boat once you've decided what the application is for your batteries the next big question is technology there are many different technology options in terms of what kind of battery you're going to use you've got these regular liquid or flooded batteries you've got a GM or you've got gel batteries already have a lithium-ion batteries which are obviously the most expensive so what we'll do is we'll talk about the technology that we have now I can only show you guys just regular flooded batteries but we'll go over all of them and we'll start with the basics okay so the very basic ones you can get the cheapest ones you can get are these flooded standard batteries are the ones that you see almost everywhere and their lead acid based batteries that are liquid filled and there are two different versions there's a flooded battery that is maintenance-free which is sealed and then you have the older style which are not sealed that you can actually open ports on them like this one and refill them inside these batteries is a mixture of sulfuric acid and distilled water and some people what they'll do is they'll check them and top-up the water if necessary I don't know that that is something that I've ever actually done typically the batteries are dead by the time that happens and I've had batteries for five years that did not need to be topped up so when you're talking about a maintenance-free battery you'll hear that often maintenance-free it means it's sealed it's not something you open and this is a great example this one has no ports on it there's no way to open it okay so that's sort of the difference with those now these batteries tend to sell for 80 to $100 and up so they are relatively cheap they have an excellent lifespan I've had I've had a set that died in their sixth year but of course the amount that you how long you keep them drained for and how often you drain them will obviously affect the lifespan and in terms of how to charge these or a battery tender you could pretty much use anything that's on the market any kind of charger a battery tender will work for these you don't have to buy anything special and get a really cheap tender and it'll work so very inexpensive to use they have a decent lifespan very inexpensive to keep charging to keep maintained okay so these are flooded acid lead batteries next up we have the next class of batteries which are AGM and gel batteries and these are called VRLA batteries that's the category which stands for valve regulated lead acid batteries and AGM and gel unlike these which have a liquid inside have a more solid or in the gels case a gel type interior AGM stem stands for absorbed glass mat and gel obviously inside is a kind of a gel paste material and these are another generation the next generation of batteries that provide a better a better charge time a better discharge rate and are considered safer so AGM out of the two is the most expensive and it does have the highest threshold in terms of charge and discharge rates so this means they charge faster and they discharge slower so you get more power out of them than say a gel or one of these guys however the drawback is that an AGM does tend to have a shorter lifespan than gel so gel is a good sort of balance between the two and of course there's the other advantage for example if you were to knock one of these over or you stored it improperly or you were in an accident this would obviously spill sulfuric acid somewhere whereas the solid batteries will not leak any kind of liquid that could potentially damage your boat or damaged wherever you're storing them and it's actually happened to me where I had a battery that was in the battery tray and I hadn't noticed it must have leaked somehow I took it out and sent it down on the boat in a different boat and when I went to go remove it the next day there was actually like a black stain in the carpet and it actually damaged the carpet from the sulfuric acid so that is one of the other advantages to an AGM or to a gel in terms of a charge or a tender you also have the advantage that you can pretty much use any modern charger for one of these guys you can double check on the box to make sure it does support AGM or gel but because it is a lead acid battery it should just charge just like any other regular type of batteries so nothing special there either you can go with an inexpensive charger and finally the last bit of technology would be lithium based batteries lithium ion batteries which are the newest generation of batteries a lot of pros are starting to move to them in the last couple of years and the advantages are pretty clear it is first of all a more expensive battery they are starting to come down in price they're at about $1,000 now for a battery maybe even 850 but there are huge advantages to these batteries one of the disadvantages one of the main disadvantages that you'll find with any kind of lead acid based battery doesn't matter if it's one of these flooded regular ones or an AGM or a gel they all suffer from the same problem and it's the power bandwidth so the more the battery drains in power the less amperage output it produces so for example if you've got some deep cycle batteries like this on your trolling motor and they're starting to get pretty drained you'll actually notice a performance decrease on your trolling motor you'll get less torque out of them you'll get less pull and this is because as the batteries lose their charge they lose their power output this is Dawne with lithium lithium batteries maintain their full power outage output it doesn't matter what the charge is it could be a hundred percent or twenty five percent so that's obviously a huge advantage because the power range the output just stays the same constantly the other disadvantage with these kind of batteries is that if you drain them too far and you kind of push them to their limit too often you'll shorten the lifespan a life span dramatically whereas with a lithium battery you don't it's a non-issue you can drain it to like 10% and then put it back on the charger and you haven't really heard it so that's also another huge advantage also lithium batteries have a huge huge cycle number of cycles so this means how often you can drain it and recharge it it's about five thousand cycles which is about 15 to 20 times more than these kind of batteries so if you're somebody that is fishing a lot you're a heavy user and you're constantly draining your batteries you're gonna get way more life out of a lithium battery and I mean that's just gonna pay for itself right there the other thing too is that it holds a charge a lot longer cost significantly longer and it is also faster to charge so those lithium-ion batteries just hold so much capacity it's insane so you'll also get a lot more time on there and they don't lose their charge so you don't have to be as crazy making sure they're on a tender for their maintenance they can be stored for months at a time and they pretty much keep their entire charge another really cool advantage and this is one that has me seriously looking at the lithium batteries is the fact that you can save on weight dramatically okay so one of these bad boys weighs like 45 50 pounds it's very heavy I'll let the embattled there's one other really really cool thing that I think a lot of people don't quite realize so you've got a 24 now all batteries all these batteries come in 12 volt sizes so if you have a 24 volt trolling motor or a 36 volt trolling motor well then you're gonna need to buy additional batteries to power them so obviously if you have a 24 volt trolling motor you need two 12-volt batteries and if you've got if you've got a 30 36 volt trolling motor you need three batteries while lifting and batteries come in voltage configuration so you can buy a single battery in a 12 a 24 or 36 volt configuration so you don't have to buy three lithium batteries you can buy one and it's 36 volts and bang you're done you can power your trolling motor with it which is obviously a huge space savings we're talking about 25 30 pound battery versus a hundred and 50 pounds of batteries so that's pretty impressive as well so if you're one of those guys that likes to run their boat as fast as you can and every single pound counts then obviously lithium-ion is kind of a no-brainer isn't it and finally for lithium batteries do bear in mind you need to make sure you have a battery tender that can handle lithium ion batteries it is becoming more common but a lot of them do not so make absolutely sure that your battery tender or your battery charger can handle lithium batteries and they tend to be on the more expensive side so not only will you spend more for the battery you spend more for the charging system but at the same time you get way more lifetime more power and overall way less maintenance okay so that's why it's a serious consideration for me just the price needs to come down a little lower all right next up we're gonna talk about what size do you need how big of a battery do you get well first of all the way the sizes work on a battery it's by something called the group number all batteries have a group number on them so for example on this battery here this is a group 24 battery you can see it's right here and up here we've got the group 31 number up on the label so the group number is what you want to focus on now I'll often time the group number will be accompanied with some letters and what that has to do with it can determine the post configuration so where's the positive and the negative on the battery and it can also tell you whether or not it's a deep-cycle battery or a starting battery so in terms of group number the numbers aren't pretty standard so for a deep cycle trolling motor battery you're going to want to look for a group 29 or group 31 all right I always go with the bigger the better so I would personally recommend you get the biggest that you can put in your battery tray so for me if these thirty ones and if you look up on forums and stuff like that everybody talks about 229 s or the 31 s in my mind I'm up in Canada and for some reason there are no 29 s here I can't find 29 I can only find 30 ones but when I look at the specs online they seem to be the same battery they have the same energy speculations the same battery dimension so I'm wondering if maybe in Canada they're 31 s and in the US it's 29 s I'm not really sure but either way 29 or 31 deep-cycle and the standard for your starting battery to run your electronics in your boat is a group 24 or a 27 starting battery but make sure you want a starting battery not a deep-cycle batteries for starting your engine so your your main battery and for your electronics and of course remember you never run your electronics your sonar equipment your chart plotters you never run those off of your trolling motor battery or else you're just asking for interference so you always want to make sure you have two separate batteries for that okay so that's it pretty easy for the sizes so 24 27 for your starting and accessories and you want to go with a deep cycle 31 or a 29 for your trolling motors or we moved her yeah alrighty so we've discussed application we've discussed technology we've discussed size that you need so next up is what brand do you go with so a lot of people ask me what brands do I like and listen you know I have not owned a boat that required multiple batteries for very long but I do have a lot of friends that have been boaters for thirty plus years and a lot of people actually recommend the good old cheap ever start max batteries that you buy at Walmart and I can attest to the fact that my last set of batteries were that brand and I got rid of them when they were six years old so that's pretty impressive for a battery let alone a super cheap battery that I got a Walmart the warranty is decent so really in terms of flooded batteries very happy with the Walmart ever start max batteries and there's a lot of people that will tell you the same thing and I found that it had a great power band the charge lasted me all day I could fish for 10 12 hours in my tin boat in heavy current and it lasted the entire day and in fact when I finally got rid of them it's because they were I noticed they were only lasting about two hours we'll get into that story afterwards anyway so but I mean there are many many other different brands out there that you could look at so while I can personally vouch for the Walmart brand batteries you've got you know Odyssey you've got optimum you've got Duracell you've got diehard you got AC Delco I mean there's just the brands go on and on and on I would recommend you simply go online do your research look at reviews and also don't be afraid to shop for sales there's a lot of a lot of these batteries go on sales you get mail-in rebates stuff like that so shop around look around and go with what what seems to be the best for your budget and for your technology needs now in terms of lithium-ion batteries like I said I've never purchased any and honestly I don't know anybody in person that has moved to that technology but I can tell you that you know I follow Scott Martin very closely and Scott Martin has moved to lithium pros their brand of lithium batteries so you can check those guys out its lithium pros DOM and he swears by those batteries he's been involved with them for the last five years so apparently that really solid brand to go to David Dudley also just recently switched he did a video at the end of the season around the end of the season 2019 and he switched to a company called Miller tech and he really loved there not only did he love the technology and overheating protection in their lithium batteries but he also loved the price point apparently he bought batteries they cost a hundred eight hundred and twenty five dollars each which is the cheapest I've ever heard of for a lithium battery and of course they will continue to go down so that is another brand you could look into Miller tech and believe me David Dudley takes his batteries very seriously okay I fished in his boat with him at the at the FLW Tour stop when he won angler of the Year in Lake Champlain and not only does he have his batteries you know in the compartments we had batteries I had batteries under my feet where I was sitting in case something died and he had the extra battery so he really really understands the importance of batteries so if he's giving a serious look and he's using Miller tech I would also suggest probably taking them pretty seriously as well okay now for a little story you're seeing me tout these brands and talking about the especially of the Walmart brand batteries the max batteries and yet I'm showing you the batteries for my boat and my wife my deep cell batteries are interstate and my my main starting battery is Nautilus battery so you're probably asking yourself yourselves why don't you have ever start batteries if those are so awesome okay so if you watch any of my older videos you will know that I was at the boat ramp when the original battery that came with this boat when I bought it died it died totally out of the blue I didn't even think it wasn't low on charge I didn't notice it losing charges too quick it just went from being awesome to being completely dead and it was dead at the ramp so I ran to the nearest Walmart with my with with the truck and with the boat hooked up and and this is after I put it back onto the onto the onto the trailer because I had already put in the water when I realized the battery was dead it was a mess anyway so they didn't have any they had no group 24 marine batteries they didn't have any max batteries they just had some other sizes that they couldn't use so next door to it was a hardware store that's all across Canada called Canadian Tire and they had these motormaster nautilus marine batteries and this is what they had in stock so I just took what was there so that's why I have this battery which has served me very well for the last couple of years or for the last year and the reason why I have Interstate Batteries is because I was in the middle of buck Fudd nowhere on a fishing now fishing up a camp and the batteries lasted about an hour and these were the original Walmart batteries that I had that were six years old and I had noticed earlier that it didn't seem to be holding a charge as long and I was like that whatever it'll it'll it'll keep going I'm gonna be fishing lakes there's no current it'll be fine well after an hour I had no more trolling motors so I had to get back to the ramp and the only place I could find within two hours distance a two hour radius of where I was was this local camping store that only carried interstate batteries and they happen to have on the Shelf to group thirty ones so that's why I've got these Interstate Batteries a lot of people have told me maybe they're not the best but listed so far they also have kept about boat powered for 12-hour days I haven't had any issues with them whatsoever so we'll see what kind of lifespan they put on but I haven't had any issues with them so that is why I don't have the Walmart batteries because all the batteries on my boat were bought in urgent situations okay so that's why so I'm sorry yeah next up we're going to talk about maintenance and installation so you now have your batteries okay so you've determined the application you've diverted to determine the brand the technology you want the size you need and now you're ready to install so what do you need to install these properly well what we're gonna do is we're gonna go look inside here and I'm gonna show you in the battery compartment the basic pieces that you need to make sure your batteries are safely and securely installed okay let's look let's have a look and don't forget again anything we talked about I will have links in the description below so you see examples of the items that were going to talk about okay okay what we're looking at here is the battery compartment for my trolling motor batteries okay now it's very important that all of your batteries sit in a tray okay so you can see here I've got a tray that's bolted down into the boat and it doesn't move nothing's gonna move out of here and the trays have straps okay so it's extremely important that your batteries are strapped down so when you're hitting the bumps and all that sort of thing your battery flying around so battery tray with straps obviously you need these a hundred percent and the other accessory that I like are these post covers so these post covers they're rubber covers you can see they're flexible you pass your wires through this and that's what goes on top of the posts serves two purposes one if the batteries for whatever reason do get loose and jump up and hit something like a metal cover you won't have a short or if you've got these in a bigger compartment where you have some loose accessories they don't fall across your terminals and cause a short and if you watch a video by Scott Martin the back of his boat actually catches on fire because he had somebody call him boosting cables fall across his batteries and started a fire the the cables melted and caught on fire so lesson learned if you would have been running these guys you would not have that kind of problem so very important the other thing you need to make sure is that you are running circuit breakers like this you should have circuit breakers and fuses protecting all of your electronics so everything that goes to your electronics or your trolling motor should be protected by a fuse or breaker and if you haven't seen it yet be sure to check out my video on how to install how to properly install a trolling motor and your batteries and I go over the proper gauge wiring how to wire up the batteries with the crossover and how to install and where to get this circuit breaker okay so please be sure to check that out alright last but not least the final thing is maintenance it's making sure your batteries stay charged and maintained it is very important that as soon as you're done you're voting for the day that you get your battery your batteries charged back up you do not want to leave them drained it's horrible for the lifespan so for the first little bit what I used to do is I had three of these battery chargers actually three of these so when I would get home I would open up all the compartments clamp on use these clamps clamp everything on to all the batteries plug it into a power bar plug it into an extension cord and that's how it charged the boat as you can imagine it was super tedious but that is what I did at first and then during the winter I would take all of the battery so then I would connect them to this for Bank no Co genius charger and I still actually do use this for my RV battery and for the motorcycle battery during the winter and some of the things like that but I did have to take all the batteries out of the boat which kind of sucked and and charged it by the way this brand does handle lithium batteries as well just an FYI this will do all kinds of batteries so that's why these are pretty expensive now what I finally did was I actually converted everything and I spoiled myself and got myself a inboard an onboard I should say sorry an onboard three Bank battery charger let me show you what I did okay come and check this out all right so under here we have a pro sport from pro marine ER this is a three bank battery charger that's built in I've installed it permanently into the boat and the way this works is you need to buy the number of banks you have that match the number of batteries so if you have three batteries you get a three bank charger if you've got four batteries you need a four bank a two batteries and two etc so this I bought it off of Amazon and it works absolutely amazing this is the third year that I use it and I love it it works perfectly and I get home and all I have to do I'll show you all I have to do when I get home is I bring the extension cord to this power cord plug it in and bang you're done nothing else to do charges the whole system and it has a status on there tells you if the batteries are any good it tells me if the batteries are dead if they're charging and all I do is I plug that in during the winter and it just keeps the batteries charged throughout the entire season so that is the way to go guys and again there'll be a link in the description to this particular brand I love it it has great reviews and it installed like you know in seconds and it works perfectly so highly recommend get yourself an onboard battery charger and save yourself so many headaches and if you want you can even go fancy and you can get yourself one of these guys so this is a AC plug in and what you can do is you can just plug that you can install this somewhere on your boat easy to reach and you just basically uncap it and plug in your extension cord but I thought it was easier just throwing it in like that so that's it that's how I did that so that's it guys I hope that really helped you figure out how batteries work what kind of technology there is what kind you need for your boat but of course as always if you have any questions drop me a comment and if you like this video obviously click the like button and don't forget to subscribe and all that good stuff and again everything we talked about there's links in the description below for everything we talked about today and I'm actually going to do a series of videos like this so stay tuned over the next few weeks we're going to talk about other components in the electrical system so we're going to talk about how to install one of these battery tenders that I've gotten built into the boat one of the chargers we're going to talk about the overall wiring of the boat and how everything is organized and anything else I can think of while we're waiting for a fishing season to come back okay so that's it guys thank you so much I really appreciate it I hope this was helpful to you and again let me know if you found this video helpful and if you'd like me to do more alright take it easy guys have a good one tight lines all that good stuff and I'll see you guys later peace [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Dan Richard Fishing

Views: 93,921

Rating: 4.9110494 out of 5

Keywords: boating, boats, marine batteries, batteries, battery, marine battery, battery installation, battery maintenance, deep cycle, cranking amps, trolling motor battery, agm, gel, lithium, lithium ion, how to, DIY, noco, duracell, optima, maxx, odyssey, everstart maxx, walmart, diehard, interstate, nautilus, motomaster

Id: YizBcI-3r6w

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020