twentyhurtz

Optima is kinda inconsistent... through my audio days i always held the yellowtop as the "ideal" battery to have. But now i work in an R&D lab as an electronics tech. Recently we decided to change battery manufacturers on one of our products, well i had to request alot of sample batteries, i called optima and a rep sent me two free batts. Well they claim very high duty cycle life and we wanted to test all these claims, we have them on a test bench that is constantly charging and discharging groups of batteries to test cycle life, optima's did hold up to what they said, but that was only with duration of resting time inbetween cylces, and once charged, holding charge for a time, but not to knock optima, but our testing showed that only about half of optima's we tested held up, some can just die out after the first few cycles..

98civdx

wow, thats something i didnt know,
i had one in my accord and never had any problem with it, also i never let it go dead.

twentyhurtz

yea, i would say about 90% of the time, battery failure is direct result of the user.. If you drain your battery to 10% DOD then you will have the most life, DOD- depth of discharge. Meaning if you only drain your battery 10%, then charge it, and always say play your sound system while engine is cranked, very rarely while car is off, then you will have the most cycle life, if you park you car, play your system 30min - 1 hour or more each time and end up draining the battery to the point the system cuts off, well then you have drained it to atleast 80% DOD, your batteries cycle life decreases ALOT when you do this. Your average SLA battery can take about a rated 500-800 cycles at 10% DOD but can only take sometimes 100 cycles at 100% DOD - usually not even that in real world application, honestly if you drain that battery to 100% DOD- which is dumb to do intentionally, but sometimes happens, then it won't be very long before your buying another one. But i still feel confident enough to buy Optima!