On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:14:25 -0500, "Flying Pig"
wrote:

As such, as our practice had been to have the switch on "both" all the time,
it's possible that the early death of the starter battery was due to
frequent deep (-er than designed for) discharge. We're working on training
ourselves to switch to "house" only when we're not in a charging mode, but
we're not there yet!

It's important to get into the routine, preferably as soon as possible
after engine shutdown. We were losing starting batteries
prematurely for a while because of exactly that same situation. Ours
weigh about 160 pounds and are wedged in behind the engines so I had
an extra incentive to keep them alive longer.

Having a formal checklist for certain procedures like startup and
shutdown can be useful. It's easy enough to maintain them on the
computer.