How to Monitor RV Batteries On A Budget.

I actually like this monitor it's it's so simple so inexpensive but so many possibilities [Music] hey how's it going Jared Gillis here and today I wanted to share with you a few options that I found for budget battery monitors that work actually fairly decent the my favorite battery monitor the one that we have is a Victor on BM v seven one two the only problem with it is it costs two hundred dollars I get it it's it's a beast of a battery monitor but the thing is really expensive so let's find some solutions that's around fifteen 20 maybe 30 40 bucks somewhere in that range I think would be able to help out a lot of people to know what's happening inside of their batteries so you might ask why would I even want a battery monitor so number one would be to know how much power you've actually drawn out of your batteries so you can figure out the true state of charge the second reason is to be able to add longevity to your battery if you know how far you're drawing it down and when you're charging it up and how far you charge it up having that knowledge can really help extend the life of your batteries so that you don't have to replace them all the time the third reason goes along with that and it's to help you know when your batteries are full when the state of charge is at a hundred percent a good battery monitor is gonna help you understand that and you won't have to guess anymore number four it'll help you understand the health of your battery if you see how many amps that you're able to pull out of your battery how many watt hours you're able to use it'll give you a good indication of how much life you have left in that battery so it'll help you know when you need to replace it and if you're ready for your next trip the fifth reason is it can help you plan for future upgrades if you wanted to do solar on your RV or a bigger battery bank this will help you understand how you're using the power so that you don't have to buy maybe as big of a battery bank as you're originally thinking if you just change a couple of things and how you're using the power or as much solar so it might even help you save money in the future for what you want to set up and the last reason is it can help you troubleshoot your system better because you'll have a more complete picture of what's happening and coming out of your batteries or going into your batteries it's not just looking at voltage so between those handful of things upgrading your battery monitor from the the traditionally poor ones that they put in RVs is definitely a good idea but you ask why not just use voltage to check battery capacity as I've seen those charts before so let's let's look at we're gonna use our batteries in our truck to show you how to determine the state of charge using the voltage and some of the shortcomings that come along with that so if we turn on our scan gauge we see that the voltage in our battery is at twelve point five volts so if we were to look on a chart that would show us that our battery is at ninety percent 90 percent full so it's a pretty good indication because the battery has been resting now this is where the the problem comes in and why it's hard to get a good estimate in your RV to do that same thing so if I turn on this key and we get a bunch of other things going I'm not gonna turn the truck on but we have fans going we have lights turning on that's going to cause a draw on the battery now when that happens your voltage is going to drop when you're using energy out of your battery it's going to cause that voltage to drop just because you're using it now the same thing happens on the other side if we were to turn on the truck and we get the engine to turn over and that alternator to kick in what happens is now we're increasing the voltage and putting power into that battery we're charging that battery so what's happening is that voltage is rising so if we look at the chart now it looks like our battery is is full it looks like it's doing great so where is it at actually in that spectrum well we still know that it's probably around that ninety percent mark but if you're drawing down on the battery it looks like it's it's lower than you actually are and if you're charging the battery it might look like you're more full than you actually are so to use voltage to determine the state of charge we actually have to let our battery rest we can't just turn off the charging or stop things from drawing power out of the batteries we actually have to let it rest because as it rests it'll find that voltage of where it's at and then you can tell but who has time to do that when you're actually out there using your RV so that's why we need things like the hall sensor or more popular like a shunt so what options do we have as far as battery monitors to be able to step up our game and know more about it so let's start with the really inexpensive one and we'll work our way up to the forty dollar battery monitor so this little guy he'll only set you back 15 to 20 bucks I'll put links down in the description to all of them but for 15 to 20 bucks you have to take a look at this little guy so simple so basic still limitations but let me show you what it'll give you you have your voltage over here we can get our voltage anywhere but it gives you your voltage and your amperage now we have both sides of the equation now we have our wattage down here and then we have our watt hours so that will show you how much energy you have used out of your battery which is a huge function to be able to have this one will help you the amperage will help you troubleshoot and figure some things out but being able to know how much energy you've used out of your battery capacity will give you a good indication of when you need to charge that thing up again now this one works off of a shunt based system and it comes with a hundred amp shunt so these two go hand and handle I'll show you how to install these later now the other thing that I like about this battery monitor is it just gives you everything it's just so easy to look at it get a quick snapshot of what's going on for instance when we went out boondocking one time I had forgot to switch over our refrigerator from electric to propane so it was drawing power out through our inverter trying to run on the energy from our batteries when I could have just switched it over to propane and saved the power in our battery so I looked at our battery monitor I saw oh my goodness why are we drawing 30 amps when I don't feel like I have anything on so it gave me that real clear picture and this one would do that too if you were to look at this battery monitor and see the amperage being drawn out when you don't think you have anything on you can be smart with how you're using your power but let's look at the other side of the coin and look at the things that this monitor won't necessarily tell you it's not gonna give you a percentage saying that you're a hundred percent then you're 75 percent you need to figure that out by looking at your watt hours by looking at your voltage and your amperage you need to kind of know your system to be able to know where you're at so four watt hours I know we're used to in the RV industry talking about amp hours so if you have a 100 amp hour battery it's a real simple conversion you just times that by your voltage so you take your amp hours times your voltage so 12-volt battery that will give us 1200 watt hours of power that we can use in that battery so if we bring down our battery 600 watt hours we know that we've used 50% of that battery so it's a real simple conversion and once you know your system and once you know what you're looking for in these numbers it's it's easy to identify where you're at now another limitation of this battery monitor is it can only read power going in one direction so depending on how you wire up this shunt if you switch the wires it will show you what the current is going in like if you're charging your battery and if you put them the other direction it will only give you the measurement if you're drawing power out of your batteries so you get an either/or which luckily we can wire up a switch and so we can have it wired that way so we can charge and this way so that we can draw out of the batteries but it's very manual and it's not automatic and it won't just work in the background and you you do have to think about it you have to know what you're doing when you're doing it and just pay attention to it still gives you a lot of great information but you have to pay attention to what you're doing so I think this battery monitor would be good for a very simple setup if you just want to be able to have a little bit more information in your RV about what's going on with your batteries this would work I wouldn't do anything more than say a thousand watt inverter on it just because of that hundred amp shunt is really going to limit you on how much power you can pull out of your battery so this is meant for a small system but because these are so inexpensive I've seen people buy a bunch of these they'll put some to calculate the charging some to calculate the load coming out of the batteries some just to show you what's coming from the solar into the batteries and they kind of put all that together and they they figure out how their system is functioning working and what's actually happening but there's also another solution so if we step it up to the thirty dollar price range we have this other battery monitor that uses a completely different sensor but this one is called the Drakh DC 0 to 300 volt but now we step up to a 200 amp sensor now this is a whole sensor in the hall sensor works completely different this will give us a good example of what a Hall sensor is this is my digital clamp meter if I turn the dial to be able to test the amperage that's going through this we clamp it on one side of the wires and it tells us on there how many amps are going through that wire right now that's basically what a Hall sensor is for a battery monitor so in this one we can see a big step up and how this monitor functions in addition to having the watt hours like we had on the last one we now have an accumulation of amp hours and one of the biggest things about this sensor is like I said the power can go both directions now it can now calculate how many amp hours have been drawn out of the battery and how many amp hours are being put back into the battery say if you have a solar setup or a way to charge the batteries this will calculate both those directions and be able to show you the accumulation on there so on this monitor we also now have a battery indicator that's going to show us roughly where we're at if we're full 3/4 half it gives us a little bit of an indication at a quick glance to know where our battery is at that's the other thing I forgot to mention with this one we might be able to still wire the switch and it'll give us the amps going in and then going out if we flip the switch but it won't actually count backwards it just continues counting up so if you know that you used 300 watt hours you can hit the reset button and you can get an idea of 300 watt watt hours going back in it doesn't work exactly that way but it'll give you a good indication of when your battery is getting full now the cons associated with this one is it can tend to drift a little bit I saw that some people were complaining that that felt like they had to reset it often because without the all the bells and whistles of the expensive one it doesn't have those kind of checks and balances to know when to recenter re0 recalibrate and start over this one just it just does what it does and when you're charging a battery it's not exactly like a 1 amp and 1 amp out it doesn't quite work that way so with that these things can tend to drift if they don't have a lot of intelligent features built into the battery monitor but this one still gives you a lot of great information with the calculation of amp hours watt hours and giving you kind of that battery percentage in there now one thing I do like is we stepped up the the size of the sensor so the first one we had a hundred amp shunt this one comes with a 200 amp Hall sensor so what that means is we can draw a little bit more power out of the system the system has a little bit more room to grow if you want to if you wanted to put a 2000 watt inverter I wouldn't be trying to push it on the peak end of that inverter but you can start to run a few more things if you wanted to build a bigger battery bank in my mind I would still use this on a smaller system but you have a little bit more room to grow your system and do additional things so option number one was around $15 with a hundred amp shunt option number two was $30 with a 200 amp Hall sensor and with this last one we step up to a 350 amp shunt so this system can definitely grow and be a lot bigger this one says that you can go up to 999 amp hours so a pretty big size battery bank that would be a massive amount of batteries but you start to gain some other functions in this one we now have an accurate percentage of state of charge because this one accurately measures the in and out and is probably the biggest one in the system so this one is probably a pretty close direct competitor to the victor on one that we use it's still hard to try and do it a direct compare because there's a lot of functions and a lot of things that are in that Victor on one that aren't in here but this one really gets you a long distance and lets you know a lot of what's happening inside of your batteries so you you get the amp power calculation you get the battery percentage you have the voltage you really gain a decent battery monitor at this point that's a good size for a good size system the shunt on this last one is definitely a little bit more elegant than the first one the first one is very rudimentary and very simple but I'll show you how to install this one and what it takes to put it together because if you could do this one you can really do any of the other one so it's really not that difficult to set up a battery monitor is pretty simple I'm actually set up everything here on the table so we can run through how to set all these pieces up and how they all go together all the components I was trying to film putting it into the RV but everything was always dark somewhere in some kind of a hole that was hard to film and so I just thought it'd be nice if it was all out here easy to see so you can grasp exactly how to install it so obviously we have our battery monitor the the display and they put the instructions right on the back of it which is really handy it gives you the wiring diagram so you really can't mess this up even even if you tried now if we look at that diagram we see that the shunt is right in the center of how everything gets wired so if we take a look at that we have a post on each side and we then have two screws right in the middle those two screws are gonna connect to the battery monitor and monitor everything that's happening and passing through this shunt so we're gonna act like this little battery pack is going to be our battery in the RV so we need to disconnect any negative wire that's connected to our batteries so disconnect that wire and it's going to go to one end of this shunt we tighten that down and now we have to add one single wire that goes from the other side of the shunt to the negative side on the batteries so that way it's the only thing connecting to our battery on the negative side everything has to go through this shunt so we can measure it so now we need to connect the wires on the interior terminals on that shunt to our battery monitor so we'll connect one wire to the the left screw and then another wire a separate wire to the screw on the right and these wires go to the battery monitor and get tightened down now we just need to give power to the monitor so we're gonna take a wire like this connect it to the positive lead on our battery and the opposite end of that wire is gonna get tightened down in the battery monitor now we need to do the same thing on the negative side so we're gonna put a wire on the shunt and then connect the opposite end of that wire to the battery monitor that'll power it up and it starts working so if we wanted to see the amperage going through this shunt if we say charge my iPhone we can see that the amperage changes if we give it some time the watt-hours will start accumulating and so the system is working it's really that simple to install now if you wanted to install a switch we can we can add a switch and let me show you how to do that this is our double pole double throw switch we have six terminals on the back is what that means so we have our wire coming in to our Center terminals and then we have our wires coming out that are going to go to the battery monitor so we have it switched in this position black is gonna remain black red is gonna remain red but if we switch it to the other position I soldered on these wires that crossed red to black and black to red so we switch it there what goes in is red and black and what comes out is black and red so it switches it so that the monitor can read going out and then if you flip the switch you can have your monitor read going in so pretty simple and pretty simple to do just solder it up and you're good to go so I think that's gonna do it for today you have three options for battery monitors it doesn't come with all the bells and whistles and the automatic functions that the really expensive ones do but at least you can find out a whole lot more of what's going on with your batteries and be able to manage your power that much better so if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to see more videos about our Ving please hit that subscribe button and if we don't see you on the road hopefully we will see you in the next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: All About RV's

Views: 718,659

Keywords: RV, RVing, RV life, RVers, Jared Gillis, Less house more living, How To RV, DIY RV, Learn to RV, Motorhome, Class A, 5th wheel, RV Electrical, RV Repair, RV America, All About RVs, Battery monitor, RV Battery, RV Batteries, RV Budget monitor, RV Budget battery monitor, Understand RV Electrical, make rv batteries last, rv deals

Id: tObHbsSDWeQ

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019