How to Maintain Boat Batteries

"Hi. I'm Albert Hedgepeth with Expert Village. Today we are going to talk a little bit about boat maintenance. What we are going to talk about now is battery maintenance while you're anchored up somewhere. One thing that you definitely want to do while you're anchored up using your radio, using your television, running your refrigerator, running other electronic devices and hanging out on the boat is make sure that you have power to start it back up. If you don't have power to crank it back up you're stuck, you're dead in the water, and either you're calling a sea tow company and spending five to six hundred dollars to get back to a port or you're anchoring up for the night and you're going to stay put. One of the easiest ways to make sure that you do have battery power while you're out and anchored up is to go ahead and select your battery to one individual independent battery What this does is it allows all the electronics in the boat to run specifically off of one battery while you are out and anchored up. This leaves you one fully charged battery to crank the boat up with whenever you're ready to start back up or to even recharge the battery that you've been using. It's a good idea to monitor on the dashboard the actual amps that are coming through the battery and how charged it is throughout the day. You might want to crank the boat up every once in a while just to go ahead and recharge the battery. Usually fifteen minutes of run time will fully charge your battery especially if you have it designated to the battery that's dead. These switches you can once you actually have the boat cranked back up; you can go ahead and throw it back to all and let it balance both the batteries and charge them together."