What's that 12v battery you have all be raving about?

[danjor]

Originally Posted by Fiskadoro

There you go.

The constant voltage throughout discharge cycle is a huge advantage. A SLAs voltage drops as it discharges, which means your finder has less and less voltage or power to run on the longer you run it on a SLA. First few hours they are fine but over time the performance starts to degrade.

LiFepo4 and NIMH batteries have constant discharge which means the voltage stays the same until they run out of power. Effectively this gives you about a third more functional hours for your fishifinder on the same amount of amp hours.

The reasons you list are the exact same reasons I went with a NIMH back in 2008. LiFePo4 sounds great but until I kill my current NIMH battery there is not much point in changing to anything else.

You got it right. Those are the advantages to the better batteries, and it is worth the extra cash if you take care of the batteries and keep them going for the long term.

Exactly I would not upgrade your NiMH until they die, but if you take care of them except them to last about 500 charge/discharge cycles. That's many years of fishing for most of us. But if you look it on trips per year basis if someone goes fishing a couple times a year get a SLA but if your doing 2-3 or more trips a month spend the $ and get yourself a good battery especially if you have a nice expensive fish finder that requires more power. No use in crippling your HDS or whatnot with a low end battery