4 EASY Tips To MAINTAINING and EXTENDING Your RV Battery Life!

do you know how to maintain your rv batteries [Music] hey guys it's izzy from endless rving the channel that brings you the best in rv diys product reviews rv tours and so much more if you're new to the channel we invite you to subscribe below and make sure to hit the notification bell and if you're back for another video we thank you for joining us and make sure to stay the end for some bloopers and a visit from a special guest so if you own an rv it's highly likely you're going to have at least one battery on that rv we have a motor home we have four batteries some motor homes have eight these things could get really expensive but they're really important for the operation of many systems in your rv and you want to make sure that you maintain them otherwise it could leave you possibly stranded without the electronics in your rv working or more importantly you could be out a lot of money so in this video we're going to give you four easy steps and how to maintain your rv batteries so here's the disclaimer this video is going to be specifically for the wet cell batteries and what i mean is these are the ones that have the liquid in them that allow them to work you don't really need to maintain your agm batteries you don't need to maintain the lithium batteries but these are the batteries that most often come in stock on rvs let me just do some explaining about how these batteries work there is distilled water in here and there is an electric light solution that solution is needed for the battery to operate properly now i'm not an engineer and i don't know all the chemical reactions that go on in there but basically you need to have liquid in the battery for it to work properly so the first step to properly maintain your batteries are to keep them charged now there's several ways you can do this you could keep it plugged in to shore power like we do at home okay we're always plugged in the batteries are always charging when we're going down the road the generator is more than likely on and the batteries are charging and then as soon as we get to camp we're plugged in again and the batteries are charging they're never allowed to drain out now these wet cell batteries these deep cycle batteries you can only use them about 50 okay they start dropping below like 12.3 12.2 volts they start getting into the 11s you could really damage the cells in the battery and they're not going to hold the charge the way they used to and they're not going to perform the way they used to so the obvious question is going to be well i have my rv in storage and i don't have access to plugging things in the first option of plugging in doesn't work for you a second option which is to put these batteries on a trickle charger probably not going to work for you either so if you are in storage and you don't have ability to plug in there's a couple things you can do okay you can use a inline battery disconnect what that does it it's kind of a manual disconnect right if you hit that it will cut off any power going from that battery to the inside of your coach there are battery disconnects that come stock but the reality is there's always a more than likely a parasitic drain always happening on the rv and what i mean is there are certain things that are always powered right so like the propane gas detector is always powered if i left this thing on for extended amount of time it will drain the batteries and with these type of batteries if you drain them again below like that 12 volt mark they're going to be shot they're just not going to work anymore another effective way that's very primitive but it works you can just disconnect all the terminals right now i will warn you if you have a somewhat complicated battery setup like we do you might want to take a picture of how all those wires are set up before you do that i would also suggest that maybe you put down some kind of uh non-conductive material just in case those wires wind up touching you don't want any spark displays so put something in between the contacts and the wires so that way there is no chance of any electricity being conducted all right so i have my safety goggles my gloves my surgical gear for number two which is maintaining the fluid levels of your battery like i said earlier these batteries are wet cells they need to be maintained now what i mean again by wet cells is that there is an electrolyte solution in these batteries that go over the cells don't ask me again the engineering but basically you have to make sure there's enough water in these cells okay so how do we do that what we're going to do is i do it once every couple of months because we're always plugged in maybe that's bad but so far it's worked out well okay you're going to take a flat head screwdriver in my case a phillips head screwdriver you are going to pop the top off right each battery has going to have two of these covers okay you can see here i'm pretty good what you want is the fluid levels to be about three quarters about a quarter from the top so three quarters full about a quarter from the top you don't want to fill them to the top because what happens is that when these things start working they're being charged they heat up they will start bubbling right that's normal but if there's too much fluid in there the fluid would overflow right so not only we have like sulfuric battery acid coming out which you don't want but more importantly is that if though that solution escapes right the electrolytes are in that solution it's like when you sweat too much right if you sweat too much you get rid of electrolytes you start doing your muscles don't work right well that battery will start not working right because you can't replace the electrolytes like you can when you sweat too much you want to make sure that you give it enough room so when it it starts uh heating up and expanding that your fluid doesn't boil over how do you refill these very easy now we have you got to put distilled water in there okay do not use tap water you have to use distilled water distilled water all the minerals and elements are removed it's just straight up water now you can do the fancy method you can they sell battery watering systems and they have all kind of configurations and they're just hoses and all kind of contraptions that go in here and you just pump water into them and it fills them perfectly i do like the poor man's method i essentially just do it by hand on the front ones i pour it in the back ones i'll take one battery out and then i just get a little solo cup and i kind of just pour it in until i feel that it's full enough but the most important thing however you choose to do is you gotta use distilled water okay the third really important thing is to make sure that your connections are clear of corrosion the only thing you're gonna need is the appropriate socket for whatever size nut you have on your battery and then some kind of wire brush now they have these fancy ones that are made for batteries you can put your terminals in there and clean them up rub whatever corrosions out but basically corrosion is going to get in the way between your uh wiring and the contacts of your battery and you don't want that you want it to be as clean as possible to have a connection that's as good as possible so i'm going to quickly show you on one terminal although our terminals are pretty clean but how to clean it up so i'm going to go on the negative side here okay i'm just going to loosen this up now what you want to be careful is is that the negative doesn't touch the positive unless you want a spark show you don't want that to happen okay or whatever tool you have doesn't touch both of them especially if they are metal so you can see like it's a little bit it's really not that dirty but i'm just gonna use the wire and you can see how it starts cleaning stuff up now there's just like a little bit of crud on there it's not a big deal what you want really is if you start seeing like the white uh like acid which is not really much here like this stuff right here that white stuff if it starts getting on the terminals it could be a problem but you can see how easy that cleans up these are really good they're pretty clean so you just go around the whole thing you know clean it up make sure all the connections are good i'm sure everybody's surprised that our stuff is really clean well yeah i do you know kind of maintain these mr ocd but yeah go and make sure you get all the wiring back correctly all right and then you're gonna do the same thing for every connection make sure they're all clean you can see these two have been done the rest of them haven't been done in a little bit but they're very clean all right the fourth and final thing you're going to want to do is you want to make sure all your connections are on tight again you're going to use your socket just go around periodically crank them down okay make sure they're tight because if they're not tight they're not going to have a good connection and when things are in tight that's when you start getting sparks and you don't want sparks because you don't want fires and you don't want shorts and all that other good stuff so just go around periodically just make sure everything is nice and tight not only the connections but make sure if you have a strap on your that's holding your batteries together make sure that strap is hooked in and tight right so when you're going down the road these things are not moving so guys those are four easy steps to maintain your rv batteries you don't have to do it every day once every couple of months i would highly recommend you do that definitely once a season if you do that those wet cell batteries will definitely last you longer okay they can last three to five years on average if you can get that good because those are like a hundred and ten dollars each to replace we plan on when those are no longer any good hopefully upgrading to lithium and then you have to do any of this crap it does it all itself but then 900 bucks a pop and we have four right so uh anybody uh battleborn if you're watching you want to send us batteries you'll be more than welcome to do a video on them uh in the comments below let us know what kind of batteries do you have on your rig if you have wet cells what do you got uh-oh we have a visitor do you want to be in the video but anything charge this yeah that would not be good where are the phones okay back to the video right so in the comments below if you have wet cell batteries like we do uh let us know how you maintain them if you do anything different if you have that fancy watering system which we will put a link below to those watering systems did you upgrade to lithium if you did i'm jealous if you know anybody that has an rv more than likely they have these type of batteries feel free to share this video with them we've been doing this now so this is our second season on this motorhome these batteries are still really good they hold you know 13 volt charge and then we did it on a travel trailer and that worked really well also so feel free to share this video with them to the left of me i put our rv diy as well as our rv essential upgrade playlist then for myself and mj who's on the camera we thank you guys for watching and we'll see you on the road [Music] so here's the disclaimer that's my alarm so here's his the [Music] you

Channel: Endless RVing

Views: 31,818

Keywords: endless rving, rv battery, rv battery maintenance, rv battery testing, rv battery terminals, rv battery tips, deep cycle battery care and maintenance, rv battery maintenance tips, rv battery charging, rv battery videos, rv lithium, rv lithium battery systems, rv lithium battery, maintaining your rv batteries, battle born batteries, rv, motorhome, camping, recreational vehicle (industry), rv battery monitor

Id: eoI1Hrwr704

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020