How to Wire Multiple Batteries to an RV with Josh the RV Nerd

hey guys Josh cr-v nerd here at halo Darvey of Coldwater Michigan and more more people are going boondocking more and more people need more battery reserve time but fewer and fewer of us know how to do that that's why I kind of want to put this together because one of the things that a lot of people are gonna want to know is how do I add more batteries to my camper I'm not going to get into a lot of technical information I'm not going to get into milliamps and this and that and everything I'm not gonna try to confuse people that way my goal is to just show you how to physically wire batteries together so that you're getting the correct output to your trailer to provide proper power to your RV systems now first of all I don't want to sound like I'm talking down to anybody but my experience has been that the level of electrical engineering that most of us are familiar with um it is roughly the equivalent of knowing which way to put the batteries in the TV remote and thankfully they put a picture inside of that little remote control so that I could help remember next time that's that's normal I still have to look at the picture of the remote but I also have somewhat of a background in electrical engineering not massive I'm not a genius at this stuff I know just enough to get myself in trouble anyway um what I'm getting at here is pardon me for starting really simplistically but there are a couple basics understand first of all there are most commonly twelve volt and six volt batteries that will be in question when it comes to the idea of adding extra batteries to an RV so most things like this is a 12-volt battery right here invisibly it's hard to know if you're looking at one versus the other if you're not sure ask a professional that's always the best solution because getting this wrong is a bad thing to get wrong and an expensive thing to get wrong so your RV has 12 volt systems that's what runs the lights the fans a lot of things in that camper are 12-volt powered um well normally a single 12-volt battery will get that job done just fine now for the sake of ease and simple I'm going to use some color coding here and to help you remember it I can do a little mnemonic red is hot black is not now RV color coding is not always really consistent sometimes white as hot sometimes white as negative it depends but for this demonstration right here red is positive black is negative so first of all starting with the ultra basics how do we wire up a single 12-volt battery now this part is going to be laughably simplistic I don't believe anyone will have too much of a challenge understanding this right here especially with the color coding that I have going on so you take the hot line or positive line from the trailer and it goes to the positive line or the positive post on the battery it's got a little plus on it to give you a little cheat sheet if even a guy like me can understand that and then obviously the other side is just by default your negative line so you're gonna hook your trailer to negative line now you have a smooth continuous circuit of electricity through the battery to the RV this part is not hard to understand I'm not going to belabor this too awful much right here what gets tricky is when you want to start adding a second battery or beyond because now we have to decide are we going to add a second 12-volt battery which requires that you wire in parallel form at or are you going to add two or party not add but utilize two six volt batteries instead of one 12-volt battery or two twelve volts in parallel when you have two six volts you put them in series so they add up to equal twelve volts so instead of just explaining all that let's take a quick second actually show you how do you wire these things together because that's kind of probably why you're watching this in the first place okay from this point forward if you don't understand what you're doing or if you don't follow what I'm saying stop stop call a professional or let somebody who does this for a living handle it for you because it's a very expensive mistake getting this wrong okay what we're looking at here are two 12-volt batteries wired in parallel so it's not 12 plus 12 equals 24 when you're in parallel you maintain a 24-volt system so this line right here represents the trailer so the trailers hot line connects to the positive post and it loops to the other positive post now very similarly the trailers negative post connects to the final battery and then loops to the first one now what's cool about this is you can basically duplicate this as many times as you need like some campers like Eagles a lot of your big J codes they can be wired for like 4 to 6 batteries well I you know this is a very easy thing to just say ok just daisy chain the next one onto it and all you do is just repeat the pattern positive to positive negative to negative the only thing is the first battery in the chain connects to the trailer with the positive line and the last battery in the chain connects to the trailer with the negative line again this is not extremely hard to understand and the little diagram that I might be popping up here there from point to point I'm going to like basically leave a link to that so that you could download that to your phone or something like that if you want to say if you need to have a little pocket reference I'm going to make that available to you so you don't constantly have to refer back to this video listen to me talk over and over again because trust me my wife will agree that you know enough is enough every now all right now what we're looking at here is two batteries wired in series meaning the voltage of each battery is added together in the case of an RV you don't want two 12-volt batteries wired in series because then you're pumping 24 volts in your RV when something's made for 12 and you give it 24 this is not a case where more is better this is a bad thing so when you're wiring in series like this what you'd be looking at is two six volt batteries so one of the questions is why to 6 volts so why not go to 12 volts isn't 12 bigger than 6 for those who aren't where the reason that people do this is that 6 volt batteries have significantly reserved meaning more time boondocking between recharges that you have more power in reserve bigger batteries in innocence because the cells inside the batteries themselves are much bigger it will give you probably at least twice the boondock dry camping time if not more it's it's very impressive how much more power six volt batteries have however they are it requires that you buy two of them and they are significantly more expensive per battery than 12 volt batteries but again it gives you a far greater reserve now this the color-coding system i've had going on here so far breaks down a little bit here but it's really not that complicated it's actually this is one of the most simple ways to wire something so we have the the trailer comes in to the positive line on battery number one now this is where it freaks people out because you're jumping the negative of battery one to the positive of battery two because we're creating a straight line electrically basically and then this goes out to the trailer so six plus six equals twelve volts to the trailer that's the difference here and again this will cost more but it'll give you more boondocking time so do you need to do this I don't know are you planning on boondocking primarily or maybe just occasionally if it's a maybe just occasionally then you could probably just go with a pair of 12s wired in parallel as we saw previously save yourself a chunk of money and maybe you'd have a little solar battery tender something like that now and then are you serious like no no no no no you don't understand I'm gonna go camping in the desert and I want to be able to use my fans and my lights anytime I want all the time that I want well then you probably want some kind of solar even portable of the case and then you're gonna want a pair of six volt batteries to give you that additional reserve time it doesn't provide a greater surge of power into the RV it just provides the power of the RVs intended to have for a longer period of time again I'm going to see if I can leave a link in the video description for the little diagram that I've probably popped up here a couple of times so that you can have a little pocket visual reference right on your phone again I cannot stress enough guys if you don't understand this if this has just like listen III you know you're not an idiot it's there's a lot of people this just doesn't sink in if you don't get it call a professional pay somebody a couple bucks one time to wire it up and then take pictures on your camera to see how it's all wired together and then save that picture on your phone market as your favorite so you can check it again next year or any time you need to swap a battery out for any reason and because this again is not something you want to screw up and the penalty for failure is almost immediate if you're lucky if you wire this incorrectly an RV might have some kind of override or reverse polarity relay or something to that extent that might help you in case you crisscross applesauce why are one of these things up but not every RV has that usually a more expensive RV one of the reasons it's more expensive is it has more failsafe some more safeguards against the human factor the oops factor of this but your real basic dollar cheaper entry level trailers probably won't so um it's it's not hard to set up it's just really important that you get it set up correctly if you have questions we're happy to try to answer a couple quick ones guys but this is one of those things that if you can't figure it out simply and easily just stop and let someone do it for you because you you want to measure twice and cut once as it works so with that take care stay safe have fun and happy camping everyone you

Channel: Haylett RV Reviews, News, & More

Views: 70,694

Rating: 4.8851252 out of 5

Keywords: Michigan, RV Dealer, camper, wholesale, guaranty, bullyan

Id: A1_PyhNjljI

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2018