CD Player and a Deep Cycle Battery

[mountforever]

Hey Everyone!

I would like to install a CD player on my Cal 22. Currently all I have running off the deep cycle battery (24) is my vhf, running lights and depth finder. Some people have told me that for a single battery that this will be too much pull on the battery and i'll run out of juice quickly. Any personal experiences with this?

Also what kind of CD player should I look for? Cheap car audio? do I need an inverter or can i just run the wiring right into the fuse box?

Any help is appreciated!

[roline]

On my Santana 525 I have had both wet and AGM 27 deep cycle batteries to run; running lights and cabin lights, ST50 instruments full set, VHF radio and stereo with power amp, subwoofer etc.... It originally also had a 12 volt trolling motor that was replaced my a Johnson 3.3hp. Both types of batteries worked well and lasted for overnighters after racing. I just kept the battery charged when at the dock and added a dual folding solar panel for extended overnighters while at anchor. I added an oil lamp to reduce the cabin light consumption of the halogen bulbs. LEDs would also have helped.
I never ran out of power.
On a J26, all he had was a motorcycle battery for vhf and running lights, a little too minimal in my opinion.

[Pub911]

You should be able to find the amp-draw of the unit by looking the specs up online. But I'm not sure why you introduce the inverter into the question, unless you're talking about powering the CD from AC current. If so, you'll lose about 10 or 15% in conversion of dc to ac via the inverter (typically).

While you're thinking about the CD, you should also consider the amount of bass you're pushing. That's the real culprit. I have a separate amp driving a bazooka subwoofer that'll make a fully charged 2-battery bank dim the cabin lights on a down-beat. Sounds great, but eats power.

Fair winds!

[RobGallagher]

Cheap car stereo should be fine if it's below decks. I would suggest an Ipod ready stereo if you have the Ipod. Nothing like bringing a few thousand songs with you

I like having a seperate battery as back up, but then again I need it to start the engine.

[merc2dogs]

I'd say go for a halfway decent car system, you can pick up a nice sony cd player (with front panel inputs) that includes a pair of speakers for $100 in many places.

I have an ancient cassette unit that has inputs, and run a CD based mp3 player on it.

I wouldn't use an inverter, just go with a 12v car system and call it good, no reason to run Ac for audio.

Just about all transisterized 120v AC audio equipment has a transformer that steps it down to 12v DC anyway, so you're just inverting 12v to 120v just to step it right back down to 12v again.

Ken.

[Valiente]

I would suggest a CD-player boom box with an MP3 bay and a set of lithium rechargeable batteries. On a 22 footer, you don't need a lot of volume, and this means at dock you can run AC and charge the rechargeables as needed and take the thing back and forth