We celebrated Angie’s birthday this week. Since we don’t leave the marina often and Amazon has not made it to Chile, birthday presents were a challenge.
Unloading batteries from the truck. In the rain, of course…
But, a couple of weeks ago we did find a company in Santiago to deliver a new set of batteries for Madrone. The shipment finally arrived on Angie’s birthday, so her present turned out to be 500lbs of lead.
We last replaced Madrone’s batteries in 2012 soon after we bought her, which means that the batteries lasted almost 8 years. They’re actually still working okay – definitely not as much capacity as when new but still fine for the limited amount of power that we typically use.
It’s likely that we could push the batteries for another year or so. We purposefully oversized the battery capacity so that we’d have a lot of reserve, so a loss of some capacity doesn’t really affect the performance. But we’re hoping to head further south into remote Patagonia next summer, so we decided to do the conservative thing and replace them now.
It’s interesting that we paid almost exactly the same price for all of the batteries (including delivery from the US to Chile, and delivery from Santiago to Valdivia, and Chile’s nearly 20% VAT) as we did 8 years ago in the US. So much for inflation!
Angie with 4 times her weight in batteries!
