battery charge

[woodinboater]

I am going to be dry camping for a few days. to keep my on board generator usage low. Can I use my honda 2000i hooked to a standard battery charger directly to my batterys without doing any harm to my inverter? I have a 1907 40'
alpine with a zantrex inverter. thank you.
woodinboater

[EngineerMike]

That's an ooold Alpine.
IIWM, I'd shut off the house battery switch just to make sure. The large solar panel is hooked thru a controller (diode) & fuse to the house batteries, but the amperage can't get very high. Your charger setup may produce sufficiently higher charge rate to mess w/the Xantrex' "thinking" & goof it up. You could also just disable the charge function on the Xantrex and that should do the trick. Of course the charger in the Xantrex can put out 100A charge rate easily so you have significant trade off w/charging time using the small gas gen & separate charger; you may have to run the little guy a lot longer.

Good luck keeping that oldie on the road!

[Old Scout]

Yup--12 volts is 12 volts but be aware. The average auto bat charger is 6-10 amps while your Xantrex inverter max charge is 100+ amps. Depending on yr re-charging needs, you will have to run yr Honda a long time to recover yr bats. Yr Onan genset was built to be used--1-2 hrs in the am and 1-2 hrs before bed isnt a lot to ask. Besides, you should be running yr Onan one hour per month anyway--so just pretend "its yr time of the month." Your call.

[Dave Fernandez]

Generators love to run. The more you use them the less trouble they cause. I have heard of Onan Diesels still running without needing any major service with over 30,000 hours. So if you have low hours you should run it more.