Charger/Inverter and AGM batteries

[thoward]

Sounds like a combo unit will work for you then.

I would check in to the Wet Cell vs AGM issue Sky brought up. Everything I have read points to Wet Cells if you can stay up with the maintanence.

I would not replace 1 battery with 4 as it can lead to issues if you ever end up with and/or need to diagnose a dead cell. If you get quality 8Ds you should not have to pull again for at least a couple years if not more.

The Rolls barreries may be the way to go if you can't get them in and out.

[DickB]

I recently replaced my 10-year old 2500w Heart (Xantrex) with a new one.
The old was having overheat problems on the charge side. It just didn't
seem to want to charge in a hot engine room. When the engine room cooled, it was fine.

Moving it outside the engine room is an alternative but not real practical as you'll need massive cables to the batteries to accommodate the resistance loss of a longer run. And, as previously said, it needs lots of venting as there's a huge transformer in there. I have a small deck freezer in my fwd stateroom. It cycles on and off all night and doesn't seem to bother people. The inverter buzz makes much less noise, but there's an internal fan that may cycle. The fellow who installed the new inverter reminded me that there are thousands out there, installed in the engine room. And they work fine. So, it wasn't a big decision for me to leave it where it was.

The best thing I ever did with this lash-up was to migrate to 6V deep cycle
batteries. Plenty of amp hours and half the weight of an 8-d. Three are
about the same footprint as an 8-d. So if you have enough room for a pair
of 8-ds, you can perhaps install 6 6V batteries (which is what I have). I
have to run the genny about 3 hrs in the morning and evening to keep the
batteries up. I'm generally only powering the refer, (and ice-maker), deck
freezer, coffee pot in the morning, microwave occassionally and misc lights,
tv, etc. The refer motor worked fine off the old Heart.

Oh, one other advantage of Heart (not sure but Outback may be identical), there are two additional outputs. You can connect say to the start bank and maybe to the gen battery. They won't charge high rates (maybe 20A), but I don't know why you would need anything bigger.

Dick