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Old 01-13-2013, 06:45 AM   #1
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Battery Questions

I'm building a new home out of state and have been staying in my mh in a campground the last three months. Until this adventure most of the time my mh has been in storage w/o electricity and when using the mh I've been in a campground for about a week at a time. Now that I have been hooked up to electricity for three months I've made some observations that are strange to me. During the course of the day when I'm using power from the house batteries for extended amounts of time I've noticed my battery charger going to the "bulk" charge mode. However, most of the time the charger is in the "float" mode and at night the charger is in the "standby" mode (indicating to me that the batteries are fully charged). After a hard rain I had water ponding on one of my slide toppers so I turned on the ignition switch to use the jacks to raise one end of the mh to get the water to run off, when I did this the "chassis" batteries were not strong enough to run the jacks.

So my questions about this situation:

1) Is it normal for the charger to go to "bulk" mode to charge the house batteries during heavy usage?
2) When the charger is in the "standby" mode why didn't the "bird" allow the charger to montor and charge the "chassis" batteries?

Water level in the house batteries is good and all the batteries are a little over 2 years old.

I switched the master switch for the chassis batteries off and put an auxiliary battery charger on the chassis batteries. The charger charged the batteries up and went to the "full" mode. I came home after this and will be going back in a little over a week to monitor the situation closer. Does anyone have any advise for things to look for when I get back to the mh. I'm thinking I have one or more bad house batteries and one or more bad chassis battery.
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Old 01-13-2013, 06:58 AM   #2
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Have you been checking the water level in your batteries? Being constantly charged it's very easy to over charge and boil the water out of a cell or two... Your charging system will keep trying to charge but it can't.
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Old 01-13-2013, 07:17 AM   #3
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Originally Posted by Rick Long View Post
Have you been checking the water level in your batteries? Being constantly charged it's very easy to over charge and boil the water out of a cell or two... Your charging system will keep trying to charge but it can't.
Rick,

I actually added some water to the batteries on Monday thinking that could be part of the problem and the charger was still switching to bulk charge on Friday after heavy usage.

Just using interior lights the charger would stay in "float" charge, I am using the hydro hot to heat water and warm the coach and I've noticed the charger going to "bulk" mode after the hydro hot has been heating water for showers and running the registers in the furnace. I assume the pumps in the hydro hot use 12vdc and probably put a heavy demand on the batteries.
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Old 01-13-2013, 07:54 AM   #4
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Have a look at this thread may give a idea what maybe going on.
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