If you want a high quality all in-one electrical set up that you can use in your vehicle or separately while you’re camping so that you can run a fridge and your luxuries from home wherever you are then you need a high quality battery to start with. Your Deep Cycle Battery stores and allows access to the power you need to enjoy a great camping experience.

The combination all in one kit of a high capacity AGM deep cycle battery, a battery box, a portable solar kit and a pure sine wave inverter is about all you need and a set up like that means you can not only access power wherever you need it and run all your luxuries, but you can keep your deep cycle battery charged up and in top condition with free power from the sun. In this article I’m going to go over how to look after your 12 volt system and get the most out of your camping battery – which is the most important part of the equation!

Basically, your deep cycle battery stores the power you need for your 12v appliances like your camping fridge or LED lighting. By putting it in the battery box it just makes that power so much easier to access and use – thanks to all the plugs and sockets. The pure sine wave inverter takes the battery power in and then outputs 240V AC power just like your power points at home which opens up the option to use your luxuries from home whether you need to work on the road with a laptop and drone, or you want to enjoy a real coffee wherever you are! You can even run a microwave or an induction cook top for easy camp meals. Finally the portable solar kit lets you easily recharge your AGM deep cycle battery with free power from the sun, so that you’re never caught short and always have power on tap!

LOOKING AFTER YOUR BATTERY

The most important part is to look after your Deep Cycle Battery – after all it is what stores and supplies the power that lets you run and use all your other gear! AGM batteries like this are fully sealed which gives you the massive benefit that you can use them in your vehicle and there’s no need for maintenance or topping up the water like you would have to do with a typical car battery and that makes life super easy. But it also means if you DO mistreat an AGM Deep Cycle Battery, there’s no way to top them back up so you will lose some overall capacity. It just means you need to be a bit more careful looking after your battery as once you lose any capacity you can’t put it back in!

So, here are the best ways to ensure your battery has a long life: Number one is to size your Deep Cycle Battery or battery bank correctly. All batteries have a limited number of times they can be discharged or cycled and the more capacity you use out of your battery the less cycles you get. Ideally, size your deep cycle battery so it’s using less than half its capacity in typical use. This will give you more discharge cycles or uses out of the battery itself, but the reason it also contributes to a longer battery life is that it reduces the amount of time that the battery is in a low state of charge. When batteries are left in a low state of charge they deteriorate rapidly and it’s a big killer of batteries. This even applies to when you’re not using your battery for a while – so if you’re planning to store your AGM Deep Cycle Battery over winter for example, charge it before you put it away and give it a charge every couple of months back to full power – you can definitely use your solar panel in the backyard for this – just set it up and leave it for a full day to ensure your battery is charged up.

Because Deep Cycle Batteries don’t like being left in a discharged state the next way to ensure a long life is to make sure you charge your camping battery back up as soon as you have used it – so the morning after a night of camping, or when you get home after a weekend away – make sure you’re using your solar panel or if you’ve got a DC-DC Charger or dual battery system that charges while you drive, you can charge your battery while you’re on the move. Another great way to extend its life is prevent it discharging at all, by keeping it on charge – this is why solar is so good. Not only does it stop your battery discharging, but it keeps it fully charge and keeps it ready to go when the sun goes down.

Another way you can prevent damaging your AGM battery is ensuring it’s not overcharging – that’s why it’s important to use a solar regulator or solar controller, which comes in the complete energy pack. Without it, the solar panel would continuously charge the battery at a high rate, so what the regulator does is adjust the output to what the battery requires – if your deep cycle battery is flat it will let as much charge in as possible, but as the battery gets closer to and closer to full charge, the regulator will taper off the charge to look after the battery. Finally there’s heat – an 8°C rise in temperature above 25 degrees can halve the life of an AGM battery overall! So avoid using or storing your battery anywhere hot! This is because the battery is sealed, which makes them safe to use in the vehicle, but means that heat will cause the battery to vent and lose capacity.

HOT TIP

You can roughly estimate your AGM battery capacity using your battery box volt meter – the hard thing is that if you’re running anything off the battery box, or charging it with your portable solar kit, you won’t get an accurate reading! When your battery is at rest and not powering anything or being charged  and hasn’t been working or being charged for a good number of hours, it should be around 12.9V at 100% charge. 12.6V at 75% charge, 12.3V at 50% Charge, 12V at 25% charge and about 11.8V is 0%