Battery Maintenance

Batteries are the heart of your kontiki and need to be kept in good condition.

Lead acid batteries should be kept fully charged. So its a good idea to get into the habit of putting them on charge as soon as you have finished fishing. If you are not fishing for a few months then top your batteries every 2-3 months. It is important to keep the battery and control unit connections clean. You can grease them with Vaseline to keep the corrosion to a minimum.

1x14ah and 1x8ah is a set of batteries will run your 46lb kontiki for 22-23 minutes before needing to be charged. 1x14ah battery will power your winch for 2 retrievals. You can also use 2x14ah batteries in the GPS 46lb, but this does make the kontiki heavier to carry and this will give you a run time of around 28 minutes. Your batteries will last around 2-4 years. Seahorse batteries have a 12 month warranty.

Under Performing batteries are the main reason for short run times. You can test your batteries at home by running your kontiki in a wheelie bin, large drum of water. Run one battery at a time and time the run. For a 14ah you should get 12-14 minutes, for a 8ah you should get 6-8 minutes.

We can also test your batteries here in the factory free of charge. Please let us know when you are coming so we can fit the testing around production for that day. We have a data logger which plugs into the batteries/control unit. This provides a graph on the battery performance, giving us run time, battery damage etc.

Here is a video showing you how to grease your battery connections.