What Deep Cycle battery for Ctek CS FREE

[R11ysf]

I have a Ctek CS Free and an old car battery that I use as a trickle charge for my car which is parked in a garage with no power for a mains trickle charger. I have a tracker on the car as a part of the insurance and drains the battery in about 2 weeks. I have been using the current set up for about 10 months and it has worked well but I think has now finally killed the wet cell car battery I was using as it was not designed for deep discharge over and over again.

So now I have killed the 70Ah 12v car battery I would like a bigger one to have as a leisure battery. Am I right in thinking LiFePo4 are the current best type of leisure batteries? I believe they are ok to be discharged down to 20% thousands of times, so is I get a 120Ah battery how long should that last with just a trickle charger as a drawer?

Anyone have any suggestions on good quality brands that don't break the bank?

Thanks

[normalbloke]

Go to Tayna batteries and buy the biggest deep cycle battery you can afford. They are usually the best vfm and don’t stock rubbish.I’ve had great results with Optima, but YMMV. Good luck.

[R11ysf]

Just looked there, they have very few LiFePo4 batteries and also much more expensive than ebay/amazon.

Does anyone have any experience of these batteries?

[GreenV8S]

R11ysf said:

much more expensive than ebay/amazon.

There are lots of people selling garbage on ebay and amazon. Unless you're buying from a trusted store front, you may be buying fakes, used items, seconds etc. If anything goes wrong you have very limited recourse. Buying directly from a well known established business gives you a lot more confidence you're getting what you expect, and a direct path to pursue them legally if anything goes wrong.

There's plenty of good stuff on those sites too, but some of the stuff that's cheap is cheap for a reason.

[Haltamer]

You'd probably find it cheaper to setup a little bank of old, giant car / leisure batteries.

A few in parallel would get you up to a decent capacity, And you can usually get old batteries very cheap on FB marketplace / Ebay - I.e. For the price of 1 new you could grab 10 old - IME, Even an older battery will do just fine for basic low drain capacity tasks.

Even better though; Can you not get a solar panel or similar down to the garage?

[R11ysf]

Sadly not, it is an underground car park.

I was using an old car battery but after 6 months it has killed it entirely. I go away for 2-3 weeks sometimes to it drains to zero. I'm hoping a LiFePo4 battery has a higher capacity of usage and also a BMS to save it from total drain to protect it

[GreenV8S]

You need to either fit a smart battery isolator, or get a big enough battery that it will never be completely flattened.

None of the batteries you're looking at will tolerate being taken down to dead flat.