Dry Camping, house batteries

[BKFMS]

I have a 2004 Mountian Aire 36 foot gas motor home. The house batteries will not keep the furnace running all night. I want to install two addittional batteries. Does anyone see any problems with this ?

[BKFMS]

I have a 2004 Mountian Aire 36 foot gas motor home. The house batteries will not keep the furnace running all night. I want to install two addittional batteries. Does anyone see any problems with this ?

[Marty & Yani]

BKFMS, no problem. I added 2 more T-105 6 vt. batteries. Had to modifiy the battery box, I rotated the batteries 180 deg. Also added a RS 2000 inverter with a 3 stage charger.
Marty

[NeilV]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by BKFMS:
I have a 2004 Mountian Aire 36 foot gas motor home. The house batteries will not keep the furnace running all night. I want to install two addittional batteries. Does anyone see any problems with this ? </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

How old and in what condition are the house batteries? I understand that it is not that great an idea to mix old and new batteries so to go from two to four you may want to consider going with four new.

You might find that your old batteries are just due for replacement or that you could get by if you set the blower on low speed and dropped the t-stat setting a degree or two so the heat/blower will not be running for such extended periods of time.

Is your converter fully charging the batteries? Could the blower motor be drawing too many amps and need servicing?

It could be something other than the batteries and even be someting as simple as a window or vent being left open or some other heat loss issue that may be running the batteries down by extending the run time of the furnace.

[rbs62]

i use 2 12v batterys from wally world the yellow maxx type 125 amp hour each used the mh last weekend ran heat at night (comes on and off ) and lights and water pump, check showed batters were still up full on second day 2 nights.temp was 28 at night

[Gary RVRoamer]

Guessing that you have at least two house batteries, I'd sy you have a battery problem if they won't run the furnace all night for one night. Or maybe you have a battery charger problem.

But adding batteries is good too. If there is not sufficient space in the existing vented battery compartment, you will have to use either sealed batteries (e.g. AGMs) in an unvented space or find some way to vent another space for the extra batteries.

As has already been said, if the existing batteries are in poor condition, you don't want to wire two new ones to them - you just end up with 4 poor batteries instead of two. I'd replace the existing ones first, then see if I still needed more.