House Battery Help

WinnebagoDRVR · 07-06-2006, 05:49 PM

Hi All,

We went for our first dry camping last weekend since buying the motorhome, only to find that the house batteries were pretty much useless. 4-5 lights on and they were just about dead inside 30 minutes. So I put 30 hours on my generator.

I have an appointment to have the charging system looked at, but have to wait until July 27th! So I did some measuring and am looking for areas that are suspect, or things I may have done wrong. I am going to contact Interstate tomorrow to see what they say about warranty; I bought the Sightseer 30B new in June '05.

Info:

RV left plugged in to have the refer all set to go etc. since purchased

Water levels checked every 1-2 months, never had to add very much distilled water

Batteries are Interstate Marine/RV Deep Cycle SRM 24 550's (2 12 volt in parallel)

The converter is the 7300 series

Now the voltages:

After being plugged in for over 24 hours, and after being driven home on a 5 hour drive, each battery reads just under 13 volts.

I turned on the TV inverter, the TV, and the overhead lights - 4-5 minutes and the low voltage alarm sounded and the inverter shut down. Voltage was then at 12.

Plugged back in, the converter shows 13.6 volts at the battery terminal and at the converter terminals (seems low to me). Within a few minutes the converter fan came on.

Started the engine, the voltage at the battery terminals showed 14.6 volts.

As an aside, I also ran the motor while camping for a few hours and the batteries still dropped within 15-30 minutes.

Okay experts... Just some bad batteries? Or do I possibly have a converter problem? I don't want to put in new batteries if they are going to be trashed as well.

Thanks for your help!

WinnebagoDRVR · 07-06-2006, 05:49 PM

Hi All,

We went for our first dry camping last weekend since buying the motorhome, only to find that the house batteries were pretty much useless. 4-5 lights on and they were just about dead inside 30 minutes. So I put 30 hours on my generator.

I have an appointment to have the charging system looked at, but have to wait until July 27th! So I did some measuring and am looking for areas that are suspect, or things I may have done wrong. I am going to contact Interstate tomorrow to see what they say about warranty; I bought the Sightseer 30B new in June '05.

Info:

RV left plugged in to have the refer all set to go etc. since purchased

Water levels checked every 1-2 months, never had to add very much distilled water

Batteries are Interstate Marine/RV Deep Cycle SRM 24 550's (2 12 volt in parallel)

The converter is the 7300 series

Now the voltages:

After being plugged in for over 24 hours, and after being driven home on a 5 hour drive, each battery reads just under 13 volts.

I turned on the TV inverter, the TV, and the overhead lights - 4-5 minutes and the low voltage alarm sounded and the inverter shut down. Voltage was then at 12.

Plugged back in, the converter shows 13.6 volts at the battery terminal and at the converter terminals (seems low to me). Within a few minutes the converter fan came on.

Started the engine, the voltage at the battery terminals showed 14.6 volts.

As an aside, I also ran the motor while camping for a few hours and the batteries still dropped within 15-30 minutes.

Okay experts... Just some bad batteries? Or do I possibly have a converter problem? I don't want to put in new batteries if they are going to be trashed as well.

Thanks for your help!

Dave from MN · 07-07-2006, 03:02 AM

I am not expert but I don't think it is the converter being you have the 13.6 volts. It's hard to believe that both batteries would be bad to go down that fast! Loose terminal or one every bad battery is my guess!

John_Canfield · 07-07-2006, 07:11 AM

First thing I'd suspect is bad batteries (or loose connections like Dave suggested) - you need to get them load tested. If you are going to be doing much drycamping you really need more battery capacity.