Well, this summer is shaping up to be the, "year of the battery", for us. Just two weeks after replacing our engine cranking batteries, we discovered our house batteries acting up. This is only our second summer with the '04 Mariner, and we inherited old batteries, so we expecteid most of this fun. But the following was interesting and dangerous.

I have (had) two Interstate SRM-29 deep cycles in parallel, as our house units. They worked OK last summer, and yes, I'm aware that group 29 batteries are not optimal for house service. But they are ok for general purpose boating as long as one is not too long off of shore power.

Problems started Saturday morning (don't all boat problems begin on our boating weekends?) with a chemical smell in the boat. This turned out to be one battery excessively gassing off. Next clue was a sound like bacon gently sizzling on the stove top, which is one of life's best sounds, except when it's coming from a battery, it's not so good. I located the bacon imitating deep cycle battery, and found it was very hot. So hot, I could not hold a hand on the battery. This was only one of the two identical SRM-29 deep cycle batteries. The other seemed to be acting perfectly normal. So out came the bacon hot battery, and quite quickly I might add.

I placed a volt meter on it and found it quite low, around 10 volts, which is odd for a battery that was on the charger all week. So it's a piece of junk, a bad cell or inside short.

But the funny thing here is that I took distilled water to the boat this weekend, to ensure all batteries were properly flooded. It really pays to open your engine hatches and smell, poke, prod and observe things. I'm real happy I caught that overheating battery. Next project is to remove the so-called good one, because it's an identical twin, and we all know what that means: it's going to crash anytime soon.

Oh, one tip for you. See the wing nuts in the photo. If you have them, throw them away and replace with regular nuts that can be wrenched tight. I've found those wing nuts loosen easily and are usually tightened with pliers. They just cannot match the connection, IMO, of a properly tightened nut. Even my own marina techs, who 'summerized' my engine room, and reconnected my batteries, failed to fully tighten those darn wing nuts. I found two loose. But a properly wrenched nut will not come loose.

What am I doing about house battery replacements? I have two nice sets of Trojan T-105's golf cart six-volts in my tool room, that came out of my last boat. They've been kept warm, dry and charged, and there is much life left in them. We will give them a try.

I'm almost afraid to ask you experts out there, but what could have happened, had that nasty battery continued being so hot, and in my mind, dangerous? Were we headed for an electrifying experience?

Cheers all,

Steve