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I have a 38 foot Luhrs with twin cummins 6c8.3 motors built in 2004. It’s our first big boat purchased in November of 2016 and clearly I have a lot to learn.
It was winterized at the yard we bought it from in Connecticut last December before we brought it up to Massachusetts in the spring. When they put it away for the winter I was told there were battery and charger issues that they would revisit in the spring. So, in the spring they installed a new Pro Mariner pronautic 12-60p charger, 2 new deep cycle +starting 8D AGM batteries, I don’t know the brand (for the two engines/house power I assume) and the boat got a new group 27 battery for the generator and a new group 27 battery that powers the helm electronics. Those existed before but they replaced them. They also installed a smaller charger to I believe handle those group 27 batteries.
The boat was put on the hard in the middle of October. I winterized the engines like two weeks later. The boat was shrink wrapped in late November and the battery charger ran for several hours that day hooked up to 110 power at the marina. I was gone most of winter. I went to the boat last week (beginning of February), ran the boat’s charger for 2+ hours and the 2 8D’s seem to be toast. One is basically dead, reading virtually no volts on a voltmeter and won’t even recognize a NOCO charger.
ProMariner I believe said their charger won’t attempt to charge a dead battery much like the new smart chargers won’t. The other main battery is between something and 25% and will accept a charge from the NOCO charger – My belief is that the bilge pumps ran because we got torrential rain for 6 weeks last fall. I know the mid bilge pump ran because it pumped out some antifreeze I had down there and I know where was some water coming in the boat because I saw some on the side of the boat in the engine compartment.
My electronics guy said not to do anything I was going to do (which was either try to bring the dead battery back to life with a dumb charger that just sends current then use my NOCO after the battery has some charge, or run it parallel with jumper cables to a good battery to trick it into thinking it’s one good battery and hook the smart charger to that until the dead battery had some power. He said even if I get it back to life, it’s not going to ever really be healthy or hold the charge it needs to hold again. He also thinks 2 8D batteries is not the correct configuration for this boat and is recommending potentially an 8D for the house needs (lights, radio, fish finder, bait wells, what have you) and one or 2 group 31’s for the starting side of the engines. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on what I should use for batteries going forward. The 8D’s were $1,200 total bucks and it looks like I may be throwing them away in 2 months. We are going to try to save the one with power then load test it in the spring. I called Cummins today to ask what the cold cranking amps were for these motors and they don’t even seem to know. They said, the range was 660 to 900 CCA’s
I could use advice going forward as well. I was told this week (too late) the easiest thing would have been to disconnect the batteries and leave them in the boat so nothing drains them. My one friend with 8D’s said he just left them in and never had a problem and most of my other marina friends have smaller batteries they take home. I don’t think I have a parasitic draw, but maybe there was something else using juice that’s hard wired (CO2 detector, something else?) Bringing them home wasn’t really an option. They weigh 120 pounds, are hard to reach and I would have either had to pull them through the bulkhead door or disconnect the piston to the hydraulic engine hatch and I have no idea how much that engine hatch weighs. Going forward I am going to try and have the boat wrapped right after it’s pulled so the bilge pumps potentially won’t have to run or even need power. If I replace the 8D’s with group 31’s which my electronics guy mentioned, I could potentially take those home in the winter and charge them, assuming I can keep water out of the boat. We got more rain this fall than I have ever seen for weeks on end.
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