Battery/Inverter Question

[tjd]

It has been a few months since I have had the RV on the out. So we decided to go to the state park this weekend. We are hooked up to 30 AMP service and I have Camco 55306 50 AMP Power Defender. It did rain/snow last night.

I woke up at about 5am hearing the clicking noise coming from the power bay under the RV. Sounded like the power was clicking on and off.

First thing I did was look in the control panel and on the Magnum display it said High Voltage Fault! So I pressed the on/off button and got the display changed to 16.6V.

I went out to the pedestal and turned off the power. I disconnected the Camco Power Defender. Then attached the 30 AMP adapter directly on the 50 AMP plug and plugged it into the pedestal and turned the power back on.

The Magnum Inverter was now reading 15.8v and started to drop. It has been about a hour now and the Magnum is reading 13.8v + 0A Float.

Any idea what happen? And I think 13.8v + 0A Float is normal when plugged into shore power am I correct about that?

[Sky_Boss]

Assuming you have a battery temp sensor the voltage will change a bit. The colder the temp, the higher the voltage. Depending on the batteries the 13.8 amps seems just a bit high. I'm currently showing 13V with temps at nearly 80* for my Life Line AGMs.

HOWEVER...

You should be showing some kind of amperage. I typically show 10-15 amps while float charging.

[Old Bounder]

Those DC voltages were being produced by the charger section of your Magnum. All the remival and restoration of 120vac power did was to reset the Magnum.

The Magnum had probably just gone (or was going) through an Equalization cycle (thus the 16.6VDC output). The Inverter section could have seen this as excessively high DC voltage at the end of the cycle.

The clicking noise may be an indication of a problem, but my first guess is that there is NO problem.

[Sky_Boss]

Originally Posted by Old Bounder

Those DC voltages were being produced by the charger section of your Magnum. All the remival and restoration of 120vac power did was to reset the Magnum.

The Magnum had probably just gone (or was going) through an Equalization cycle (thus the 16.6VDC output). The Inverter section could have seen this as excessively high DC voltage at the end of the cycle. ...

A couple points...

The loss of shore power might induce a ABSORB/BULK charge running closer to 14.4V. Depending on the battery profile, the time it is in bulk could be a couple hours which the user determines via the SET ABSORB TIME DONE setting. After that it should FLOAT for about 4 hours then into a NO CHARGE for a period of time. The actual times and voltages are determined by the battery profile selected so they could be different by a little bit from what I see with my Life Line AGMs. They will also be affected by the BTS reading. If there is no BTS then the remote assumes it is 72* which can result in under charging in colder weather and over charging in hotter weather.

The Magnum should NOT go through an equalization charge unless specifically called for by the user via the remote control.

Per the table for the ME-ARC charging voltages the highest voltage for any battery for a given charge state are:

BULK/ABSORB - 14.6V
FLOAT - 13.6V
EQUALIZATION - 15.5V