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House Battery Usage
Some recent posts here about house batteries and how we use them and how long they will last while dry camping caused me to reconsider mine. Long, long time members here may remember that my batteries were weak when I bought the coach and I never gave it a second thought. I was mostly going from pole to pole and ran the generator if we needed power when not attached to the cord.
Do not judge me too harshly. Jon says that “We do not know what we do not know” and I came from the fifth wheel world where we never had any 110v power without being plugged in. That was all I was used to.
I did not know that Vantare runs Everything through the inverters. The strength and condition of the batteries affects everything. When I started fighting weird gremlins at every turn, the guys here suggested batteries. I swallowed hard and replaced all 8 4D batteries, but I decided then that I would knock the number of batteries down to 6 or 4 the next go around.
However, I discovered the convenience of having all that battery power. l The next time I changed them, I put in 8 again.
We can travel 4 to 5 days, stopping along the way at night with no hookups and we do not have to run the generator unless we need to cool or heat the coach or cook a lot. Some weeks we are at a church with no 50 amp plug and no way to wire in a pigtail. If the weather is mild, we will run on batteries all night and charge them a few hours in the afternoon while running AC, heating water and cooking. If we need the generator we are not afraid to run it 10 days straight, but if not, the batteries handle it well with a few hours of generator run time each day.
I usually do not watch the inverters closely. After reading here recently I decided to watch them.
The batteries were in float when we unplugged at 8:30 PM Saturday. I drove 45 minutes and shut down at 9:30. we were parked for 24 hours. We ran the fridge, 24v water pump, LED lights, computers, clocks and a small bedside 110v fan for noise. I cranked the bus at 9:30 PM Sunday evening and before I did the inverters said 24.6.
We drove 7 hours and shut down. The inverters said 25.8 before we went to bed. 7 hours later they were reading 24.6. I am not sure that the cost of 8 4D batteries every 5-7 years is worth this convenience, but since when does anything about a bus make financial sense?
The day may come when I eliminate a few batteries when replacement time rolls around, but I kind of enjoy the flexibility it gives me right now.
Davy
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4 Replies
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Everything about coach ownership is a compromise. If we want to drive fast we give up stopping distance and fuel economy. If we opt to save time and the effort to document maintenance we risk having to accept a lower price when we sell the coach. If we want slides we give up storage space. How we deal with battery power is also a compromise. We can let auto-start handle all battery charging. But a deep discharge before recharging reduces the cycles of battery life.
If we aren’t connected to shore power or running the generator at the end of a driving day we are trading an RV park cost or the cost of some diesel fuel for the probability we are going allow battery plates to become sulfated and the battery capacity reduced with a possibility useful battery life will be shortened.
It is all about how we want to use our coaches and no matter what our choices are they are a trade off.
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True. The trade-off for me here, Jon is either to use this coach and its capabilities as it was designed and built, or put in fewer batteries at some point and wonder if I have enough battery capacity to run a refrigerator all night.
On weeks like this one where I need to park somewhere with no access to shore power, I would hate to run the generator the majority of the day and night in order to keep the fridge cold. The temperatures outside are perfect, but I would have to run a heater and an AC to load up the generator. Let the batteries that cost more than my first fifth wheel do the work they are designed and manufactured to do.
Davy
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Good example of why to keep the battery bank as the manufacturer designed.
Remember Davy, driving doesn’t get the batteries fully charged, it takes the inverter/chargers bringing the bank back up to float for full charge. It takes 3 hours to bring my (6) 4D’s back up to float from 24.2 using a 15 amp charge rate.
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Davy,
This past year I dry camped several times, once longer than a week. But while I am perfectly willing to run my generator 24/7 I don’t like to let it run lightly loaded so in that case I reset my charging current to 30 per inverter.
I generally turn it off if we are not in the coach or at night, and I manually start it for charging the batteries when my batteries get to around 24.5 to 24.8. When the generator is running I also try to load it with A/C units or whatever other loads I want. I just do not want to abuse my batteries with the deep discharge my auto-start is set for.
BTW, I only have 4 8D’s and I easily go through the night with some lights on, the refrigerator, aux compressor, etc.
So my method makes me pay attention and is a little work keeping track of things, but the last thing I want to deal with is nursing a set of batteries. At 5 years, regardless of how well they are performing I replace them.
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