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GearGirl · 11-24-2017, 03:43 PM

Me again. Had been in the bricks and sticks working on Thanksgiving goodies, wandered outside to put out scraps for wild critters, smelled a godawful smell. As I got closer to the RV it got exponentially worse. Ran in, grabbed the cats, put them in the house. Went back out - inverter was silent but the batteries on the coach were boiling and offgassing like I've never seen before (and never seen on this RV). Unplugged everything immediately and shut down all controls at the panel up front. Spend the next 4 hours babysitting the RV, ready to put out a fire in case the batts exploded. Even after 4 hours, while the offgassing finally ended (or reduced to barely noticeable) the batteries were still ridiculously hot to the touch.

Had this happened just six hours later, I would have been over an hour away and gone all day, and likely would have come back to an RV fire and dead cats.

Called Xantrex. Deflection abounds.

Am I wrong in assuming the inverter malfunctioned? I was shocked to hear the Xantrex guy say there is no safety feature to prevent cooking your batteries since it happens "so rarely."

As an engineer, I think that is pretty shoddy design approach.

Has anyone else had this happen??

tmw188 · 11-24-2017, 03:58 PM

Thank God you happened across it when you did. Where the batteries topped off, and are they all wet cells?

GearGirl · 11-25-2017, 01:58 AM

Here's where it gets wonky. So the house batteries were beginning to show signs of wear, had been topped off with distilled water end of September. To be honest, when this catastrophe happened 2 nights ago, I never opened the house battery compartment only the chassis battery compartment (as that is what housed the inverter/charger). I believe the house batteries were affected as well, as they are now swollen and it looked like vapors were escaping that compartment as well. But I KNOW one of the chassis batteries was absolutely cooked. I'm attaching a link to the video I took over an hour after I had disconnected everything, still offgassing and hot A.F. to the touch.

The house batts are definitely serviceable wet cell, and with all the vapor coming off the chassis battery, I THOUGHT it was wet as well but I'm not so sure now - maybe it's a sealed battery.

The white noise you hear in the video is the sound of the boiling and gassing, btw. And towards the end, me saying "I'd really like to catch a break one of these days." lol

twinboat · 11-25-2017, 02:53 AM

A failed and shorted battery will drag down your voltages, causing the inverter to go into bulk mode and cook all of your batteries. Its attempting to get them to 14.6 volts and the bad one will not let it.

You need to seperate all of your batteries and test for one that reads very low voltages. If its a start battery, replace both.

If they were overcharging for a long period, you may be shopping for a full set of house batteries too. Once the plates are exposed, heavy damage is done.

Your inverter/charger may be fine.