NorthWest Kayak Anglers
Kayak Fishing => Product Discussions => Topic started by: Chromer on January 16, 2018, 05:20:32 PM
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After deciding on purchasing a Lowrance hook 2-5, I have continued my research on a battery. I am between the Nocqua 10ah and the Wilderness Systems lithium ion battery. Hobie has just come out with a lithium ion battery installation kit featuring the nocqua battery which has caused me to lean towards it. I haven’t heard much about the Wilderness systems battery but the USB ports and 5ah more have me stuck.
I would appreciate any input.
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Go to the Northern California Kayak Fishing forum and look for their very long discussion about these batteries. Lots of early adopters of both the Nocqua and the WS in that forum, and a lot of good hands-on reports.
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I have the Wilderness Systems battery. I like it enough that I didn't send the second one back, but I don't know if I would buy it again. It has an auto-shutoff that sounded like a good idea that was even better than an inline fuse, but has turned out not to be. The auto-shutoff is supposed to only trigger if more than 1.0 amp is pulled from the battery, but it triggers at less than even that low level. I've run a higher end inline meter on it to see how much current my Hook 4 was pulling to make it trip. No matter how high I set the brightness and any other settings, I never could make it pull anywhere close to a full amp (never more than 550mA), but the first one would trip every single time I tried to start the fish finder unless the battery was completely full charge. Wilderness Systems customer service thought I might have gotten one of the first batch that had an issue, so I returned it and got another one that had just been shipped to Austin Kayak from Wilderness Systems. This one is better, but not perfect. It occasionally has the issue, and I'm still paranoid about it. It's tolerable by making sure that I hook up the fish finder to the battery and turn it on while I'm still at my vehicle. If it trips, I can plug the battery into the car's USB to start charging it, which resets it and lets me try the fish finder again. If I don't reset it that way, it takes at least 10+ minutes. I've never waited long enough for it to reset other than just going and doing something else and coming back hours later. You can see more about my initial experience with it in this thread that I started back then.
http://www.northwestkayakanglers.com/index.php?topic=19613.msg208980
Other than that issue, the thing is great. I've never run it down to the point that it wouldn't run the fish finder if I ever got it started, even on 10+ hour days of fishing. It's great for lots of other uses like when camping or when the power to my house goes out, because it has multiple ports for charging other devices.
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Thanks for your input Jason. I had read your thread and was hoping you would respond.