31 Deep Cycle Marine Battery

This will power an inverter (I regularly use it in this way on my boat). Your inverter rating is what it is capable of doing-not what it will draw from the battery all of the time. The power it uses is dependent on the load (what you connect to the inverter). Also, the inverter is not 100% efficient meaning the power conversion takes some power (hence, the cooling fins and/or fan to get rid of this energy in the form of heat). Most consumer inverters are about 85-95% efficient depending on the load-your user manual will likely specify this. As far as wires to connect this, again it depends on the load and how far the inverter is from the battery. Since this is a 12V DC and the inverter probably puts out 110-120v (assumption US application), the current draw by the load is about 10 times the rated current of the device (see the nameplate and see how many amps it says (e.g., "5.0A" for my drill-the "A" is amps). Amps Not Volts or watts (there is a little more to this but I am trying to keep this readable and not too much of a textbook) are what determine the size (gauge) of the wire you need to connect the device to the inverter and the inverter to the battery-this will be a much bogger wire than is required for the AC (110V plug) side. As a general rule here for this 12v battery and a 120V AC load the amps drawn from the battery are about 10 times the amps used by the device on the load side of the inverter, so my 5.0A drill example would be about 50 Amps from the battery. Search the internet for “wire sizing calculators" based on current (Amps) and length of run (distance from inverter to battery) to determine the size of the wire you will need-you generally need big wires to connect the battery side-it depends on the load and should ideally have an inline fuse or circuit breaker near the battery (closer to the battery the better) to protect the wire-the fuse protects the wire from melting if you draw too much power (the inverter probably also has another fuse to protect itself). Whoever said the piece about more amps used when a motor is starting is right-electric motors (drills, compressors (refrigeration and Air Conditioners) are different from say, light bulbs in that there is an inrush of current when they are started (or are under high load) so that is likely the second, higher, rating on your inverter-is for the burst, short duration, load associated with things started-It can accommodate it briefly but can not sustain it. The watt rating for the inverter is the most it can convert to AC power. keep in mind that Watts are equal to volts multiplied by amps (correspondingly, amps are equal to watts divided by volts (P=IV)). The battery is rated as 115AH (AH=amp hours) which technically means it can produce 115 amps for one hour before it is fully depleted (meaning it is brought town to 10ish volts when it has no load on it and it has rested for a while) and even this changes with time and temperature-there is lots of info on the internet about flooded lead acid batteries and how they are rated. So, in the 5 amp drill example from before, the draw on the battery side would be about 10 times that (10*5=50 amps) so it would roughly be able to run for two hours before the battery was completely dead. Keep in mind, it is really tough on batteries if you discharge them to more than 80%. Generally, 50% max discharge is a good guide if you want your batteries to last long (The cycle rating you sometimes see-is how many times it can be discharged and recharged before it loses half of its original capacity). Super long response-Sorry-I Hope this helps.

No it does not require a vented area. It is a sealed AGM battery.

The battery comes filled with electrolyte.

Yes