Awile back there was a report about airplane batteries that were better and cheaper than Opttimas ? Can someone help me find the supplier? I know they have tons of good stuff and i can't do the right search! Help Rottonron
Check out Odyssey family of batteries as a lot of home builders of aircraft use their batteries. http://www.odysseybattery.com/Home Odyssey are a tough battery, easy to maintain and fairly priced. Odyssey batteries are used in a lot of off road applications and take a beating like an Optima. I have seen them in some pictures of hot rods as well. Some are compact and have good power. I am looking at Odyssey as an option to replace the $600 Concorde Battery for our airplane. The one Odyssey battery battery they make for aircraft is less than a third of the cost of the Concorde or Gill batteries and have a good reputation. The Concorde is the best aircraft battery and they take a lot of care to keep them healthy. The voltage has to be kept up all the time & it requires an expensive battery minder that they recommend to keep a battery a live. A person can check out how to maintain the aircraft batteries on the manufacturers sites. They aircraft batteries have no threshold for any storage time below their nominal voltage . Our flying club airplane gets a new battery about every 2 years and because it is a certified aircraft it is limited to the expensive certified batteries. An aircraft battery would be my last choice for a car battery.
We've used the same Odessey for 10 yrs in 2 different 1/2 mile dirt cars which have had way too many "incidents" on the track with cars and walls. My avitar has had the same one longer. Both have 60 amp mini alternators...
Aircraft batteries have the infamous “faa/pma” stamp. That means the manufactures make lots of money. I would stick with an optima ordered from summit. Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
If you have a basic hot rod w/no a/c Or big wattage stereo, lots of us run this lil dynamo; odyssey pc 680 https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-PC680-Battery/dp/B0002ILK6I
Stay with the Optima or Odyssey batteries. Concord aircraft batteries are good but $$$$. Gill batteries are about 1/3 the price of the Concords but don't usually last more than a couple of years IMHO.
More likely they have to keep a big-ass pile of money saved up in case they get sued by the bottom feeders. The point stands though, I guess.
I buy quite a few aircraft batteries, strangely enough for airplanes, and they are not cheap at all. If it is a certificated aircraft, i.e. not an experimental, you need to use a faa/pma battery. Much of the cost can be attributed to the liability insurance the manufacturer must keep pretty much forever. As I recall for example the last year Cessna made a 152 the aircraft retail was close to $78k, of that about $24k was for the plane and the rest insurance to cover a lawsuit that could happen fifty years or more later. Also, aircraft batteries generally don't have a lot of CCA in that is doesn't take a lot to turn over a four cylinder with less than 8:1 compression. The folks above are all correct, buy an Optima, Odyssey or something similar.
Someone may have recommended the aircraft battery to the OP as a compact battery but was unaware of their cost in making that recommendation. Aircraft parts are expensive due to all the costs and effort to certify the parts for an airplane with the FAA and the risk of litigation. As soon as parts are for a certified aircraft the cost goes a decimal place or two to the right. We were forced to buy an alternator regulator that was north of $600 that is the size of an old ford regulator. The certification process locks airplanes in on what they may use while it makes for great safety it really holds back technical advances being put into old airplanes that would make them better. Some manufacturers make parts for both homebuilt aircraft and certified. They do not certify the homebuilt parts but they are built to the same standard at a fraction of the price. For example a compact Garmin radio that is state of the art that is marketed for homebuilts is half the price of a certified unit.
Agree with all the above 100%. There-in lies the attraction of the homebuilt and many such as the series of RVs are built better than the certified items.
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