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68Camaro wrote:

Engineer wrote:You might want to look into glass mat batteries.

http://www.dcbattery.com/agmtech.html

This little one I got from HF supposely uses that technology, but the battery is just 35Ah and I'm going to want something several times larger at some point. Do you have any specific suggestions from your link above I can focus on?

I've been wondering about this topic a bit myself. Would it be possible rather than making a big purchase of a set of larger batteries, couldn't one purchase these 35AH batteries as they can afford and then wire them in parallel (positive to positive, negative to negative)? This would keep the volts at 12, but double your AH. Therefore after you paced yourself and purchased maybe 6-8 batteries, if one would start going bad, you can remove the bad battery and not bring down your whole system. Just my thoughts, am I wrong on this?

(Don't forget to take the used sealed lead acid batteries to the scrapyard, mine pays me about .30/pound)

I dunno for sure. I'm trying to get some of my EE friends to help but so many of them these days are digital guys that they barely know more than I do about electrical stuff. Still working on finding a solar guru. The HF battery wasn't all that cheap. But maybe I haven't shopped for batteries lately, I know they're going up. Still pricing stuff, as well.

In search for the true optimum...

68Camaro wrote:The HF battery wasn't all that cheap. But maybe I haven't shopped for batteries lately, I know they're going up. Still pricing stuff, as well.

I just priced it on their website, and it was just over my guess of $2/Ah. If you bought them one at a time with 25% off coupons, they'd be about $1.50/Ah. After figuring in shipping on an Alibaba deal, that's pretty close to wholesale.