Battery Issue

Even if your pod bakes in the afternoon the battery won’t get up to that peak afternoon temp because it has so much thermal mass. It will probably settle out closer to the daily average temp, as long as it’s in the shade. Now if it is in direct sunlight that’s another story... In that case even just painting the battery box white would help a lot.

Yessir!

But look at it this way, it could be worse. My family on my mother’s side are Yoopers from Ishpeming. Now that’s some cold country.

I like SWVA. 73 was the high here today. We get enough snow to know when it’s winter, and enough heat to know when it’s summer, without freezing or sweltering for months or everything turning brown all summer. Just my opinion....

Heat accelerates almost all chemical reactions, including corrosion rates. A rough rule of thumb is that reaction rate doubles for every 10 deg C (18F). So at 110F you are getting something around a 4x reduction in shelf life of a battery relative to what you’d get at 70.

But the temp effect on chemical reactions causes batteries to have more internal resistance when they’re cold, because batteries undergo a chemical reaction when they charge and discharge. So they produce less current at a given voltage and need higher voltages to charge properly when they’re cold. That’s why people think cold is bad for batteries.

5 year lifetime is normal for a deep cycle battery, whether it gets cycled or not. Batteries have a shelf life, which is shortened by warm temperatures and effected by battery chemistry. The lead antimony alloy used in deep cycle battery plates shortens their shelf life but gives them more cycling ability.

Batteries also have a cycle life, and the number of available cycles depends on depth of discharge and on plate design and alloy. It’s a race to the finish line depending on whether cycle or shelf life is shorter. You can think of deep cycle batteries as optimized more for cycling than shelf life, so you wouldn’t want to use them if you didn’t do much cycling, like for example in a starting battery.

Bottom line is that 5 year old deep cycle batteries don’t owe you anything, time for a new one.

Originally posted by jato What did you find out, was one of the cells really low or was a load test given and just shown the battery to have failed the test? With proper maintenance batteries can last quite a long time.  I have a pair of group size 24 Interstates that were built 12/2010 and 3/2011 and get used a lot - we usually boondock.  Big thing for us is not to draw down below 60% S.O.C. or 12.2v before charging again as well as keeping an eye on electrolyte levels and fill with distilled water when getting low.