Community Forums

wa8yxm · 01-10-2015, 02:24 PM

Inspect the batteries (Visual) if they show signs of bulging .. You will have to replace them (Do not forget the chassis battery) IF they look normal pop a cap (Assumes flooded wet cells) and inspect with flashlight,, If still liquid, Buy Lotto ticket and recharge by any means (Jumper cables, Portable charger system (Generator) Start motor home Genny using jumper cables and let converter convert (You may need to start it by using an outboard charger some converters do not like truly dead bateries).

But I am guessing you will need new batteries,, Then see above about charging them.

NOTE A full charge (Assuming they are dead) is at the minimum a six hour job.

spyderRV · 01-10-2015, 05:17 PM

I had an extra battery in the corner of my garage that sat until it was totally dead. 0 volts using a meter. I connected it to a trickle charger to bring it back to life. Success, it survived it's extended period of dead. Now, will it have any stored power. So I plopped it into a car to test it. As soon as I tried to connect the second cable it sparked big time. After much head scratching, I pulled out my volt meter and found I had recharged it .... backwards. It worked but the post connections wouldn't fit. I figured it wouldn't survive another kill reversal process so I recycled it. Moral of the story, you wont know until you try. I would trickle charge them to see if they will survive.

Ray,IN · 01-10-2015, 09:39 PM

One time my coach battery bank went totally dead, during summer. I made sure they had adequate water, plugged into shore power, not charging. Turned out the inverter setting was wrong. After reading the Xantrex manual, it set it to "force charge" and very slowly the batteries came back to life. Perhaps the transfer switch was damaged by the power outage, is the reason for no power in the coach.
Does your inverter manual indicate a fuse or circuit breaker installed?
If you have and know how to use a VOM or non-contact voltage tester, I would begin checking at the RV power cord, working my way closer to the inverter/charger until I found the problem.

mhbell · 01-10-2015, 10:02 PM

Some battery chargers will not charge a completely dead battery. Also a shorted cell in one of the batteries in the bank can cause all sort of problems. I have had batteries frozen and brought them back to live after taking them to a warm place and trickle charging them for a couple of days. What did you have running in the coach that would run the house batteries down in so short a time? Unless you had a bunch of stuff or a couple of lights turned on they should have never discharged that fast. I have had several Mtr Hms and never had the house batteries run down unless it set for a couple of months with out power and then they never went completely dead.

gemini5362 · 01-10-2015, 11:23 PM

I am going to make a good old fashioned guess here. I do not know the answer and I am just guessing. If you have 120 volts shore power available and you are not getting power to the camper the only thing I can think of that would be the cause of that is if you have a transfer switch that transfers power to shore power instead of generator power. It might run on 12 volts which you do not have. I do not know if that is the case or not it is purely a guess

Now to something to try. Take a lamp electric drill something with a power cord on it and try plugging into shore power where it is at. Does the light work. If so you probably have shore power if not that is where your problem is.

If you have shore power disconnect all of the batterie and put a sock or anything around the cables to keep them from touching metal. Take your battery charger or a battery and jumper cables something that will get 12 volts to your camper. Once you have some kind of 12v available see if you get 120 volts to your receptacles etc. On most of the MH I have seen all of the lights are 12volts they would not come on just because you have 12v if the batteries are totally dead.