So I bought this bucket truck on the cheap ($1800) for my pops to work on the roof and cut trees around the home place. It works mostly as it should, save for some rat chewed wires from sittings out in the ding weeds.
The bucket is 12V electric over hydraulic and the batteries that came with it were old junk. I threw a couple nearly new matched RV deep cycles I had in it to get it moving. The battery life is TERRIBLE! Going up with the bucket and once around about kills them even with the engine running. The 460 gas vacuum of an engine only has a single normal sized alternator, which seems lame to me, and I really don't think running it all the time would be ideal anyways. I think it originally had 4 or 6 series banked 6V AGM batteries like a big motorhome or golf cart.
I'm not really keen to throw half the price of it again at a new set of batteries, especially since this thing may only see 10 hrs of use a year. The gears in my head are saying the best thing would be rig it up with a stand-alone pony engine hydraulic pump. It would need a second larger reservoir to feed the pony pump and probably a selector valve so the 12V system could stay intact.
Anybody have any thoughts on what they'd do?
Oh and here's a couple pics of it