House battery type 2013 View Profile 24V

[Avsfan33]

I have a new to me 2013 Winnebago View 24V. It has two different house batteries, one a deep cycle and the other a marine starting battery.

They both work but are probably 4 years old so I'm exploring a battery upgrade. I'm a little confused on why someone would use two different types of house batteries. Any thoughts of what I should replace them with?

[Morich]

Maybe you have a boat shop where you turn up lots of used batteries to get the last bit of in your RV?
Or perhaps you have a friend who scraps them and you want to sell the RV?

Just looking around, I have to admit great difficulty in figuring out what folks do!

[be happy]

The owners manual states that "deep cycle" batteries should be used.

Its hard to answer why past owners do anything. When I had to replace my coach batteries I ask an RV pro what to use. I for the most part was told as long as I RV plugged in most of the time just go with good deep cycle batteries. No need to go to the more expensive batteries. If you are going to do most of your RVing at parks not off the grid I would stick with standard deep cycle batteries. Most are in the marine family.

This link may help also
https://winnebago.com/owners/owner-r...s-and-diagrams

[creativepart]

Why did someone use a different battery? They were too cheap to buy new batteries OR they were on the road when one battery died.

Here's the proper way forward... you won't like it.

Remove BOTH batteries, buy two brand new true deep cycle batteries and start fresh.

If you replace one battery and keep one battery you'll shorten the life of the new battery and just be back in the same boat again.

What Group size are they? Group 24? Group 27? or even Group 31???. The larger the battery the more storage capacity it has. I'd put the largest that will fit in that location. If you could get 2-Group 31 batteries you could have 200ah of storage which would be great.

A good place to source batteries is Amazon. Look for AGM Deep Cycles that will fit your battery bank.

[Morich]

When looking at batteries it is a good time to look first at how and why you use them.
Some actually don't need coach battery very much at all while others do far different things and can't live without the biggest and best.

We actually went through a number of different situations over the years and as we wound down our RV use, we also found we had little need for good coach batteries!
Our biggest use for them was when we stopped for lunch while driving and needed to start the generator to run the microwave warming lunch!
Once the generator was started, the rest of the battery power came from the AC powered converter, so the batteries were not needed.
Other times it was as little as turning on the water pump when I took a break from driving!
But that is where the personal choice comes in and it is hard to know yourself on things if it a new adventure!
If we had found the coach batteries were down after we drove a couple hours, we could still start the RV engine to get the generator started, so we gave little thought to the coach batteries.

RV use is very much like everything else we do? There will be lots of people tell you what you have to do and sometimes they give little consideration to what YOU do. They only consider what they do and expect you to conform to what their "rules" require!

The person who put the mixed bag of batteries in may have been old enough and free enough to not care what other people wanted them to do!
If people wanted to tell him he was wrong, maybe he just told them to mind their own business?

The point is that you need to look at what YOU want to do. Go cheap, save money on useless stuff or go big and have great batteries as you expect to use them?

[Fanrgs]

Good advice above, but DO NOT replace the old batteries with "marine starting" batteries. If you are sure that you are always going to be plugged in at RV parks or COE or state parks that have hook-ups, a couple of cheap deep-cycle batteries from Walmart or Sam's will be sufficient. Just remember to check water levels before each trip. For a little more money, you might get two GC2 golf cart batteries with more A-h capacity. And, if you really want maintenance-free batteries, buy two, more expensive, sea!ed AGM batteries.

Of course, the ultimate would be two LiFePO4 batteries and an inverter, so that you can run everything in the RV--microwave, 120vac TV, coffee maker, toaster, Instapot, etc.--except the AC. But, since you don't have a 12v fridge, all that expense may be overkill unless you plan to do a lot of no-hookup, dry camping at Walmart and USFS or BLM cgs. or actual boondocking (dispersed camping) on public land. You can use the engine alternator and generator to recharge those batteries, so don't absolutely need solar panels. But solar does give you flexibilty in choosing dry camping/boondocking campsites, especially in the sunny Southwest!

As an example, we just spent four nights without hookups in northern AZ and never once ran the generator. Our alternator and solar panels provided all our power for the 12v fridge, water pump, on-demand WH, conv-micro, induction cooktop, Keurig, device recharging, lights, etc. One unique device we also ran without the generator was our "AC". That's because I removed our melted-down 90#, 120vac C-M 10 heat pump last spring and replaced it with a 30#, 12v TurboKool evaporative cooler. We are currently sitting in Caliente, NV ("caliente" being Spanish for "hot") on a 90-degree, late Sept. afternoon and the temp inside our Navion 24v is 72! Of course, NV is one of the best places in the country for evaporative cooling, along with AZ, UT, NM, CO, and WY. I would not recommend it anywhere east of Colorado or west of the Sierra/Cascade Mtns.--too much humidity there.

[RanDog]

My personal recommendation is to replace with same Group No. AGM Deep Cycle batteries. They do not spill, and require no additional water for the life of the batteries. They are around $150 from WalMart.
https://www.walmart.com/search?q=agm...=agm%20battery