Community Forums

JoeCon · 01-30-2012, 07:10 PM

House batteries in my 2001 national diesel pusher do not hold charge. I can start main eng with 2 main batteries then start gen after about 15 mins. The monitor shows bat status as red then goes orange and will take about 30 mins to an hour running gen to charge.

If i wait just 2 days and start, the house batteries are low.

Replaced main 2 batteries and main eng starts fine but gen will start if I let eng run for about 15 mins then battery status will show green. I will then start gen and monitor will start with red then move to orange in about a min or two then orange for half hour or more. Will charge to green status then I will shut down gen.

Then the same process happens again.

Any thoughts on what is causing the house batteries to lose charge overnight.

Checked water a while back looke ok. I am going to check water again and may test each battery by it self to see if any have bad cells or bad'

Thanks
Joe

mfire1339 · 01-30-2012, 07:26 PM

JoeCon,

Do you have an inverter and is it turned off.

Mike

garym114 · 01-30-2012, 09:24 PM

If you are just charging for 30 minutes to an hour the batteries are not getting fully charged. It probably would take three or four hours of charging, maybe more, to fully charge the batteries.
Use a volt meter instead of the colored lights on the battery monitor.

deandec · 01-30-2012, 09:45 PM

Agree, if your house batteries are depleted, they will likely take 6 to 8 hours of generator time to recharge to about 80 or 90%. If you keep running them down to 11 dcv, you will shorten the useful life of the batteries. Best to begin recharging at about 12.0 dcv which is about 50% depleted.

Inverter on wih an icemaker or water heater on te inverter circuit would draw them down rapidly. Another big draw are the propane furnaces.

Full charge is about 12.6dcv. Stop the generator, turn on some house lights for about 1 minute. Then apply the leads of a digital multimeter to the house battery terminals. They need to read at least 12.6v to be near a full charge.

You can buy a meter at auto or hardware stores for about $10.