It's interesting that this topic comes up on this list as its been an
ongoing discussion on my boat live-aboard discussion group. A gentleman
named Colin Foster has been very informative as a resource and has been
promoting his product which is a battery combiner. Essentially switches the
alternator charge from the house battery to the starting battery once the
charging cycle has completed.

Most boaters have two banks of batteries and try not to run the house
systems with the starting battery. It is helpful to be able to crank your
starter with your house battery in the event of an emergency.

Here's a link to a thread on battery combiners. Colin Foster's comments are
there.
http://www.irbs.com/lists/live-aboard/0110/0587.html

Two 6V golf cart batteries wired to give you 12V provide very good deep
cycle power which are popular with boaters.

Cheers,

Colin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com]On Behalf
> Of Terry Kay
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 4:38 PM
> To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
> Subject: Re: Optima deep cycle batt. as starting battery?
>
>
> Scott,
>
> The idea of having an extra battey is to lessen the chance of you
> running the primary starting battery down while camping.
>
> I myself, would enjoy the thought of knowing that I have an extra
> battery besides the one I'm using for the house current.
>
> Johnson Controls makes one hell of a battery--Optima is the best your
> money can buy.
>
> If for some reason the monetary outlay is a little much for the
> Optima--hit Walmart--they have deep cycle batteries cheap.
>
>  Two is always better----Right Benny?:>)
>
>             ______________
>            |[  ] [  ] [ ]\
>            |    |    |    |
>      ~~~ ~||-(())----(())-|
>
> Terry--
>
>        "Zoom, Zoom, Zoom"
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~