The batteries shouldn't be going bad so soon - even with poor maintenance. On the other hand if they let them go dry or through multiple complete discharge cycles .....I do not have the POD on my OC45. I purchased my boat as dealer inventory so was not in the position of selecting options. That being said I have had issues with my chart plotters and Autopilot that are possibly voltage drop related. I am going to monitor this in the coming season. One big concern I have is how my batteries were maintained prior to purchase. My boat was built in late summer/early fall 2012. I purchased it in August 2013, so it spent a winter in the dealers possession. I get low voltage warnings at the panel after what seems like a short time sailing. All this aside it is not my place to second guess those who have opted for the POD, but for myself personally I would not have ordered it. Even though the bowthruster is not perfect, it does go a long way to covering most situations. The money spent for the POD is the equivalent of a genset.
I have AGM Batteries and from prior experience with my wife's BMW they do not seem very tolerant of being allowed to fully discharge. We used to park her car in the winter and were not the most diligent in keeping the battery charged. This resulted in two replacements over the course of 3 years. We only got 2 years out of the last one. I know batteries don't like to be discharged for long periods, but I wonder if AGM's are more susceptible to damage from this. I am going to have them load tested as well. My slip neighbor has the same boat and his batteries have died a few times from the shore power ground fault circuit protector tripping, a common problem with this newly required device. His batteries are failing already after only a year. My suggestion to anyone with expensive AGM's is to be very diligent in keeping them charged.The batteries shouldn't be going bad so soon - even with poor maintenance. On the other hand if they let them go dry or through multiple complete discharge cycles .....
First thing I'd try is a load tester on the batteries. There have been a number of reports of MFDs going off on 423's. Had that happen once while I was using the bow thruster. Turned out my batteries after 4 years were marginal. New batteries and no more problems.
Boat fixer,I am interested to hear of any other problem being experienced with this system, I am a boat owner but work on the other side of the fence. Due to our location we were left to deal with D&G problems with minimal support, after much investigation we advised Beneteau in early 2012 that there was a low voltage issue being generated by the pod rotation motor.
Pod rotation power was being drawn from the same source as the electronic control, this low voltage spike causes the system to go into fault (as mentioned above) and forces the helmsman to shut down and restart to reset the system. Beneteau intorduced a wiring upgrade early 2013 to overcome this problem, the upgrade is over complex and not as reliable as our original change (we trasferred all control circuits onto the engine battery, place all high loads onto the service battery, install a VSR to ensure engine battery voltage does not drop to the levels of the service battery during high pod rotation demands).
Very interested to hear other experiences and resolutions found.