Leaderboard

Starting/Cranking battery is a whole other thing. There are some lithium batteries now that can be used apparently but there's also a lot of info about how they could void your motors warranty (different power ranges or something like that) and from what I saw you couldn't use the alternator without a bunch of extra stuff. I'm sure that'll change in the next little while but I decided to put that off and stuck with a big AGM for my starter and electronics/house power You could absolutely use a small(ish) lithium for the house needs (size it based on your transducer/graphs/etc). I hooked up a meter to the battery and went around turning everything on and came up with about 4amp so a 60ah batter would do me 15 hours (roughly). But since I had just bought a new big group 31 agm for the starter and all the wiring for the rest of the boats electronics was already setup for that I left it as is. If I end up with a lot more electronics I might consider a dedicated battery but it's not worth it for me at the moment. The noco charger I have is 3 banks and can do any mix of battery types so it can charge my 2 lithiums and the agm starter (https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08G3DLYX8/)

I picked up a couple 12v60ah lifepo4's from canbat (canbat.com) for my 80lb ulterra last spring after the original lead acid's hit their end of life. They were really good guys to deal with and were very responsive when I was asking questions varying from capacity needs (they didn't push to upsell) to post sizes etc. Found quite a few reviews of the company that were good and they do a 10 year warranty and I didn't want to deal with any cross border stuff. I also picked up a Norco charger (3 bank charger - 2 for these guys) which works great - don't forget to include that in your budget. After one season I'm really happy. The bluetooth app makes it really easy to use tell how much juice you have left (will show me how many hours at the current draw and so on) and over the winter I don't do anything - they were at 70% after the last time on the water and they're still at 70% here in March.

Been involved with a conservation group for over 25 years. We started out raising and releasing pheasants for the township hunt, then morphed into fish netting surveys, planting water plants (30,000 of them),planted thousands of trees, fishing derbies, bluebird nest boxes, trail building, benches, shoreline erosion, and dozens more projects. We will be building a swallow nesting structure on a 40 acre property that was reclaimed farmland. This is kind of a signature site for us and 3400 shrubs and almost 4000 trees later we just have to remove some fencing and it will be finished. I am not sure how long we will be keeping it going because of the age of the volunteers involved and most of what needed to be done has been completed. The fish population at the Binbrook conservation area has crashed and we will be pressing the Niagara Conservation Authority to study the issue but they have limited resources and a lot of internal turmoil to deal with..

Weize 12V 100ah Lithium has a 10 year warranty, currently selling for $299 US. So $600US + charger and you've got a nice setup for your TM.

Don't remember the Zoo Board but joined OFC (OFC) back in the early days, probably more than 20 years ago. Posted a fair bit in the early years then things became silly and there were those that jumped all over anything that was posted. A little like the wild west, LOL. Was invited to an early days Lakair GTG and had a blast and never missed one, not sure how my liver survived but it did. Fond memories of those days and of those that are no longer with us. Some good, no, some great people on this site. Have ongoing long term friendships made at those Lakair GTG's. Thanks to TJ for the start up and thanks to those who maintained law and order over the years.

Thx for posting that. Here's another---starts about 1:12. A true eccentric by all accounts JB apparently encouraged DL to go out and have a solo career. JB was quoted afterwards as saying that was the craziest and stupidest thing he(JB) ever did

What I read and was told was anywhere from 50%+ is good for longer term storage (https://battlebornbatteries.com/faq-how-to-winterize-your-batteries , https://explorevanx.com/blog/how-to-store-lifepo4-12v-batteries, https://www.evlithium.com/Blog/how-to-store-lifepo4-batteries-for-long-term.html and others). The idea is to ensure any residual self discharge won't put you in a danger level where you kill the battery as apparently the batttery monitoring systems can't detect/help with this slow drain. But that does bring up one point that I really found when investigating last winter: because its relatively new tech for our use cases (using them as deep cycle batteries in a boat) the info is really all over the place. How best to charge, how to store, how to protect them, what to look for when buying - you'll find a lot of different answers to any given question. Hopefully that all settles as more people use them in situations like us but for now I'd just recommend making sure to not trust any one source of info and if you can get an answer from the seller/warrantor that would be best (canbat told me they'd be fine at anything over 50% for the winter - https://www.canbat.com/faq-lithium-iron-phosphate-lifepo4/) Oh and for my case they're stored in the boat in a heated (10 degrees) garage. Storing them in below freezing and especially charging in below freezing is a whole different thing. Now someone remind me to follow up here next month when I take the boat out and find out that all the answers are wrong and I'm out of power 10 feet from the dock

Good on all of you for helping others when you're able. I do volunteer a small amount of my time to keep our local fishing club running but that's about the limit of time I volunteer. However all the money I make building rods and then some is given to my local food bank and other charitable causes, it's a considerable amount when viewed annually.

I'd also be buying from the US and using a service like Crossborderpickups. Seems like we're still paying a really high premium over here.

I remember meeting TJ for the first time at a GTG. He was with this young lady that worked at Hooters. He got rather nervous when I said I was a newf,but the young lady had a big smile on her face. Not sure what that was all about,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Good times