Lead Crystal Batteries - Any good?

[Tim Good]

Whilst speaking with Will at Sterling he mentioned they are testing some lead crystal batteries with promising results. Almost as good as Lithium I think was the comment.

Has anyone had any experience with them?

ELFA seems to be a UK distributor but their website is old, has errors and their number diverts to an outsourced virtual call centre. Doesn't give much confidence.

 

[No Regrets]

I googled this.

Looking at nearly every websites reluctance to offer any significant information about prices and with warranties not exceeding 36 months on a product designed to last an alleged 18 years, I can only conclude I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole... :disgust:

 

[Plevier]

I had never heard of these before. A bit of digging shows that they have been around since at least 2012 but with no impact on the market afaics.
Of course one can be wrong and should not automatically dismiss different ideas but all the sales literature etc that I can find reads as 100% bs.
It appears that they use microporous glass fibre separators as in an AGM battery but also solidify it with silica as in a gel battery. Does that give you the best of both worlds or the worst?
Their warranty terms are a joke.
There is a thread on cruising forum from 2013 in which the UK distributor (at the time - may have changed) makes some ludicrous statements.
I haven't found any pricing info but expect they are premium priced!
It will be interesting to hear how you get on with them if you gamble.

 

[Barbican]

Been umming and ahhing about these for a while - as well as the Firefly Carbon foam jobbies.

Perfect if they do what they say, but hard to find solid info particularly in the case of the Betta Batteries stuff

So I will just have to wait, and go with lithium Mastervolt MLI-e when a bigger one comes along...

If you get any real data out of Sterling (who seemed anti AGM originaly) I would be very pleased to hear