Reply To: Alternative simple electrical system

Welcome to TeardropForum.com Forums Teardrop Builders’ Forum Alternative simple electrical system Reply To: Alternative simple electrical system

#1085
restonthewind
Participant

You shouldn’t discharge a deep cycle, lead-acid battery completely. Routinely discharging it more than 50-60% before recharging it decreases its lifespan very substantially, so if you really need 100 amp-hours at 12V (roughly a kilowatt-hour) from the battery each day, you need two of these batteries. If you need 200 amp-hours (to run a small AC all night), you need four of them, which puts the weight over 250 lbs.

Lithium batteries are a lot more expensive up front, but they last a lot longer, even if you routinely discharge them a lot more, and weigh a lot less, so the price is competitive in the long run. That’s what the people selling lithium batteries say, anyway. You could run a small AC at night with two lithium batteries weighing only 60 lbs., and the batteries would last many years longer than AGM batteries.

If I only wanted to power small electronics (phone, small laptop) occasionally, I’d use an AGM battery, but to power a small fridge and multiple laptops that I need for my work all day, a lithium battery seems worth the extra expense.