TL;DR - I had to put a new starting battery when my lights were left on by the facility that stores it in Las Vegas. I also took the opportunity to "capture" the battery a little bit better.
I mentioned this in my trip report, but I recently replaced my Northstar Group 24F starting battery with the exact same battery. Well, technically, it's a different battery and has a different brand label on it, but it's still manufactured by Northstar and has all the same specs as the original (which is why I got it).
I installed the original Northstar as my house battery in 2019, and transitioned it to be my starting battery when I converted the house 12v system to LiFePO4 in 2025. And, while I'm sure it's not quite as peppy as it once was, it has done a great job of maintaining a charge over all those years. Until the lights were left on - accidentally, I'm sure - for nearly two weeks by the storage folks.
When this battery died, I knew there was only one AGM I wanted to replace it with: The Group 24F AGM from X2Power. Northstar stopped selling their batteries direct to consumers a few years ago, but continue to provide their superior product through the BatteriesPlus house line, so - after finding one in stock at 2:00am on a Saturday morning - I headed to the BatteriesPlus parking lot, unfolded the tent, and climbed up the ladder for a few hours of shut eye.
The new battery worked fantastically through the remainder - which was, essentially, all - of the trip, but when I got home, I noticed that it suffered from the same shortcoming as the previous Northstar variant: it was a little too small for the battery hold down in the engine bay.
Being just slightly too narrow or short or in some way differently sized that the stock battery, the hold down keeps the battery mostly in place, but still allows it to slide about 2 inches toward the center of the engine bay. Not close enough to cause any issue - or even be at risk of a real problem - but having the battery move around at all isn't a good thing, so I decided to address it.
Initially I thought about welding a piece of steel - that would capture the side of the battery in order to keep it in place - to the existing tie down, but then I realized that I might get a different battery in the future, so a more adjustable solution would be a safer choice. That meant drilling a hole for a single bolt - which would secure the new piece of steel - after forming it to the correct length to capture the battery.
It's already been through plenty of rough roads, and this simple solution is working well!
