I have found NAPA batteries made by Johnson Controls to be absolutely worthless. Johnson CAN make some good batteries, but I believe NAPA has set the contract parameters just to the point where the battery intentionally fails within the warranty period, hooking the customer into coming back to claim a few bucks credit on the warranty...to repeat the cycle over and over. I am not a casual user, my son and I have about 20 pieces of equipment and commercial vehicles, we use a lot of batteries.
Appreciate the real life experience as I need to replace a couple. Which brand(s) have you been happiest with?
In the equipment that takes a lot of shock and vibration, surprisingly, plain old 48 month Interstate batteries have been very reliable for us. It's just an anecdote, but I had 4 group 31's in the excavator, they served about 5 years. I thought, well, they must be about wore out, I'll take the one with the highest voltage and put it in the forklift where it gave good service for three more years, I thought well, it's gotta be toast by now, but it load tested within specs, so I put in the diesel welder..where it resides today. I just checked the little punch out date tabs...I put that battery in service 9 years ago this June. But, it doesn't get very cold here, low teens Dec and Jan, rarely gets to zero.
