I'm wondering if my onboard charger might be shot too. I've been having trouble with my 2 deep cycle batteries running down faster than I think they should and it might be that one wasn't charged at all. I have a volt meter but don't know how to use it. How would it be to put one of those little battery maintainers/chargers on the batteries for a few days after using them? I have a couple of them laying around.
check each battery on its own, across the neg and pos terminals
if you test across both batteries that are "daisy-chained" you'll be seeing the combine voltage (>24V) and that won't register on a typical 20V DC setting used on a DC settting of a DVM
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you might see < 12V after a day of trolling
you should see >13 V on both when the charger is charging them
you should see 12.3-12.7 after letting the batteries "rest" after turning off the charger - don't measure them immediatley - it takes a while for the chemistry to equalize and show you what's really goign on as far as stored charge
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check and make sure your batteries are full of fluid - use distilled to top them off - tap/well water can "kill them" with salts/contaminants
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Talons, xi5s, and some other units draw a parasitic charge if they're not disconnected during storage
dumb
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year five of my gels - amazing batteries - it appears they were worth it
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this year for the first time I forgot to unpug the xi5 and it took two days to charge them because they were down to liek 10V this spring (stored outside)
I know spending the winter outside, discharged, would have ruined a normal wet cell deep cycle battery
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weird thing was that when I first hooked up the dual bank it showed "green" for both batteries - which wasn't atypical after a winter of storage
what I didn't know is that they were so EFFED from spending the winter discharged that the current they were taking from the charger was so low/limited that the charger thought they were charged! I took the boat out and found the batteries had nothing. Got home, hooked up charger - and only after about two hours did the charger start showing "red" - indicating the batteries were fianlly drinking in the current. It took > 48 hrs to charge them. Yikes!