Thinking about your question, I contacted my battery distributor today regarding the availability of an 8-volt like we used to use in 6 volt vehicles and tractors. As far as Continental goes, they are out. He can get the usual 6 volt battery in either the standard continental or optima, but the only 8 volt ones he has access to are golf cart deep cycle types. For what its worth, the optima batteries that we sell from continental have the letters CBC ( continental battery company) before the part number. Other than that they look like any other 6 volt Optima battery. Personally the Optimas that we sell I don t much care for. We tried several times to use the 6 volt Optimas in tractors, and they just don t hold up in our instances.
There really aren t that many battery manufacturers out there. Most brands are made in one of a couple of places to a certain specification, and a sticker is shoved on it. Deka makes most of the Continental batteries that we personally sell, but it still depends upon the spec, as it s hit and miss. Our group 24cs's are junk, our xd-31's are the best by far marine battery that I ve ever used. Both make by Deka, both with Continental labels.
So I guess the point is, I would use whatever has the best warranty, that a local business keeps in stock. There s nothing worse than having to wait a week for a replacement warranty battery to arrive.
While we are talking about it, date codes are important. My delivery guy brought 12 group 65cs's this morning that i will be sending back next week. The little round sticker on the side of a lot of batteries gives the date. In this case, they where c22. That means they have been on a shelf somewhere since March of last year. I went into an Oreilly a couple of months ago and happened to notice that their particular 6 volt batteries had been on the shelf for two years, as they where marked d21.
Last point I ll make. Sometimes you ll see a battery with a round sticker showing the date code, and you ll notice another sticker on top of it. That means that at some point they tested a battery that has been on a shelf and is over the six month rotation period, and it tested ok, so they just stuck a new build date sticker over the old one. Thats not a practice that we would ever use at my place of work, but it very much happens elsewhere. For a bit last year the vendors where leaving off the date codes, and we where told to just sell the batteries that tested ok regardless of how long they ve been on a shelf. Yeah, Tonto no go to town. I had my helper engrave every one of those when they came in.
