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The End of My Toyota TrueStart Battery (long-term)

TL;DR - Though it's a great battery, my days of running a single Group 24F Toyota TrueStart battery are numbered; I'm moving to a dual battery system. And, I can no longer recommend the DBPOWER 600A 18000mAh Portable Car Jump Starter, since it failed to start my truck when I had a dead battery.

To date, I've run a single battery - the main starting battery - in my rig, and it's worked great. The battery I've been running (since 2011) is a Group 24F Toyota TrueStart, and it's done everything I asked of it - started the truck, run all of the communication equipment (Kenwood D710G dual-band ham radio) (Uniden Pro 520XL CB radio), charged phones and tablets, powered the ARB on-board air compressor, kept the ARB 50qt fridge at 35ºF, and even powered the Warn M8000 winch a couple of times.

On this last trip though, I had a bit of trouble on at least two separate occasions, where the fridge went into an error mode overnight due to lack of battery capacity.

This issue was compounded by the realization that the DBPOWER 600A 18000mAh Portable Car Jump Starter I carry in the truck doesn't have enough power to start the truck when the battery is really dead - something I found out after I returned and tried to start the truck for the first time.

I don't blame this on the battery at all - quite the contrary; I think the Toyota battery has probably performed better than it was ever expected to perform. That said, it's time to make a change - a change to a two-battery setup, so that I can run the fridge at night without worrying that I may not be able to start the truck in the morning.

Likely I'll go with two Northstar Group 24F sealed lead-acid batteries, but I still need to do some research into exactly how I'll setup the whole system. Suffice it to say, this will be a winter project for me this year.

 

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