Battery Options, Part 2—Lead Acid

October 16, 2021May 11, 2018 by John Harries

In Part 1 of my evaluation of battery options to replace the aging house bank on Morgan's Cloud, I took an in-depth look at lithium batteries and concluded that they were not right for us.

So that left three types of lead acid batteries in the running:

Carbon foam (strictly speaking these are a variant of AGM, but let's keep it simple).
Liquid filled
AGM (the incumbent)

As in the last chapter, for the purposes of this discussion I'm assuming a 12-volt 800-amp hour house bank, the size we now have on our boat and a reasonable average capacity for many cruising boats.

Let's dive in:

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John was born and brought up in Bermuda and started sailing as a child, racing locally and offshore before turning to cruising. He has sailed over 100,000 miles, most of it on his McCurdy & Rhodes 56, Morgan's Cloud, including eight ocean races to Bermuda, culminating in winning his class twice in the Newport Bermuda Race. He has skippered a series of voyages in the North Atlantic, the majority of which have been to the high latitudes. John has been helping others go voyaging by sharing his experience for twenty years, first in yachting magazines and, for the last 18 years, as co-editor/publisher of AAC.