laptop cigarette light, battery drain?

[IMPULSE DRIVEN]

I left my laptop plugged into the cap cigarette lighter over night and it drained the battery, so I tried starting using the house batteries, as I have a switch for that, well that failed and I had to be jump started. I recently had a voltage regulator installed, is it possible they didn't hook the house batteries up right?

[Shadowcatche]

This point up the need to monitor your batteries. A Bogart TriMetric TriMetric Battery System | Bogart Engineering would have let you know you had a problem and if batteries were being charged at the correct rate. Even a simple Volt meter would have helped. At the simplest level a VOM from Harbor Freight would have told you the system was not working.

[Robi.1014]

Agree with Shadow. A laptop in STANDBY (and charging as well) should not kill your chassis battery.

And something to consider:
Your battery-isolation relay (that give you that "battery boost" function) is a solenoid that must have juice to its coil in order to activate. So it's possible that your solenoid's activation coil is powered by your chassis batteries (which on this occasion were dead). So your house batteries might have "been there for you", but could not be connected during the "battery boost" phase because the solenoid was not activating.

But back to your dead chassis battery (or battery bank) health: Sounds like something is not right with the charging system ... or there is a bad battery there (e.g., the infamous "dead cell"?).

[Gary RVRoamer]

You say you were using the house batteries as a source and it still killed the chassis battery? Something wrong there, since they are supposed to be isolated. Did youget the chassis battery recharged after it went dead the first time? I don't think your Impulse charges the chassis battery from shore power, so it doesn't recover unless you drive it or use an external charger.

[pwf16129]

could something as simple as needing to clean cables, alternator failed on my class c decided to install a new one wire 140 amp i had on shelf installed fired up charging my chassis battery just fine took volt meter for grins checking other connections.
found 14.04 at my isolation solenoid but 12.71 when i touched it to battery itself,removed cable looked good cleaned with old style wire battery cleaner reinstalled 14.04 at battery, a slightly loose or dirty cable can play havoc on your charging system .
as stated earlier a volt meter and a little preventive maintenance can sure save a lot of trouble.

happy travels