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Time to charge house batteries?
We have four 8D Lifelines (new in May 2014) providing power to our 24 volt Liberty conversion. When the 20kW Kohler generator automatically fires up, how long should it take to re-charge the batteries? We’re dry camping in the Lambeau Field parking lot and its been running for about 4.0 hours which seems like a long time. During that time we used the shower (heated some water), ran the bath toe-kick heater (1000 watts), a 1500 watt cube heater, probably the 1200 watt water bay heat gun, and some lights.
I realize the loads beyond the chargers is stealing a little power from the chargers, but I’m wondering if something is set wrong, if maybe one of the two chargers isn’t charging, or if I have a battery problem.
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3 Replies
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4 hours does not seem long to me. I think that was the default on my last coach to run the generator on a low house battery situation. It is usually based on voltage to start and can be time based to shut off.
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We just ran a thousand miles this weekend and noticed that it takes about 4 hours of driving to recharge the house after a 12 hour rest. This may not help as there are so many variables.
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Dick, except for lights, not a single thing you mentioned has anything to do with house batteries.
What you left unsaid were several things. Did you use auto-start for charging? If so it is my understanding the charging is a timed event and not a voltage measurement. Additionally, your Heart inverters if you still have them have charging current settings at dip switches in the rear of the remote panels. If they are set to a low value, like 10 amps the charge time takes longer than if they are set for a higher value, such as 65 amps. What are the settings?
Additonally the unit of measurement I tend to use regarding house battery health is not how long it takes to charge, but when fully charged how long will they go before requiring a re-charge. That of course requires some constants, but I use an over night scenario where I turn off the generator when going to bed and then seeing the voltage when I wake up.
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