RV Alternator IS NOT Charging House Batteries • The FIX

hey guys what is up well my house batteries are not being charged by the alternator while we're underway we're going to deal with this problem right now details coming up on rv street [Music] okay let's get right to it my house batteries and my chassis battery is always charging simultaneously while we're underway now right now i'm plugged into shore power and my battery charger to the house batteries is on and let's take a look at the current state of charge right now you can see my current state of charge is 13.2 volts they also charge the same way when i'm running my onboard onan 5500 generator now let's go unplug from shore power back here at my digital readout you can see my current state of charge is now 12.9 i'm unplugged from shore power therefore my battery converter is not on now let's go start the engine you can see my scan gauge right here and shows that i'm charging 14.1 volts so that's how i monitor this while we're underway now let's go back to the battery bay you can see here that my house batteries now are at 12.5 they normally when the engine is running it's about 13 6 13 7 13 8 it just depends on the state of charge so it's basically the same or a little lower since i started the engine and it stays this way no matter how many uh miles that i drive here is my battery bay that is under the steps i have two six volt trojan batteries golf cart batteries wired in series and then i have my chassis battery right over here so let's test the chassis battery first to see if it's being charged by the alternator so i put my multimeter on the chassis battery and you can see right there it's charging at 14.44 now let's test the house batteries so you can see there's about 12 12.48 so i know that the alternator is charging okay it's charging the chassis battery fine but it's not charging the house batteries like it always has when the engine is running well motorhomes have several different kinds of battery management systems or battery isolating systems and they go by different names in this first diagram this is a bi-directional isolator relay delay it's also known as a bird system second here's a typical diagram of another setup called a bird and a big boy set up and third then there's a bim system a bim battery isolation manager this is what i have and here's a picture of my setup now all of these different battery isolation systems uh accomplish the same thing only in a little different ways not to worry i'm not going to overwhelm you here i'm not going to get into all the different details and of all these different systems because if i did that this video would have to be hours long and it would make your eyes bleed and and your head spin but i'm merely mentioning the three most common uh systems that are in motor homes because more than likely you're going to have one of these systems in your motorhome so i highly encourage you to research and study the kind of battery isolation system that you have research it study it and know how it works because i can tell you if you keep your motor home any length of time at all you're going to need to know that information at least the basics and this video is going to show you those basics and what i'm going to do to fix this problem in our motorhome now let's go back to this diagram right here this is a typical bird battery isolation system at the top you have the bird control box this is the computer the bird operates in conjunction with continuous duty solenoids to provide the isolator battery charging functions of a motorhome at the bottom left you have the house batteries disconnect solenoid and on the right you have the chassis battery disconnect solenoid these solenoids determine what batteries are going to get charged and when in the center you have the isolator relay solenoid on my system winnebago calls it an auxiliary start solenoid on the dash of your motorhome you have a battery boost toggle switch this switch is for when your chassis battery may be too low of voltage to start the motor home so when you press this switch to on and hold it usually for a couple of minutes i mean that's the best practice what that does is that auxiliary solenoid engages and links right up to your house batteries to start the coach now all three of these solenoids they have contacts in them and they're constantly engaging and disengaging are you with me so far okay so in summary you have your house batteries you have your chassis battery or perhaps two chassis batteries and they are controlled by a battery isolation system of some kind like this bird system does in that diagram i just showed you now i don't have a bird system and i don't have a bird and a big boy system i have what they call a bim system bim battery isolation manager winnebago went over to the bim system i think around 2012 or so here's a picture of my bim system with a bim system there's no thinking or is computerized controlled it's either on or it's off when my house batteries stopped charging while we were underway i knew exactly where to start looking let's go to where my bim system is in my coach so when we bought this coach this is a 2012 winnebago vista 35f we bought it in 2016. and this bay right here behind the front tire is where my bim system is along with some other breakers and fuses as soon as i bought this i immediately started doing a lot of research about this coach and discovered that particular bay right there was very prone to getting rain water off of the tire while underway and the at the factory it had really short little mud flaps right here so i thought well we're going to fix this problem right off the bat so i made some really wide long uh mud flaps and the box under here that particular bay i use a really good rubberized material and i sprayed and completely encapsulated that bay uh with a rubberized material so there's no way any water can come in from the front the bottom the top area is totally sealed to prevent any corrosion and water getting in there and this has worked great for six years i've actually absolutely had no problem whatsoever then as part of my electrical annual maintenance that i do every year i'd always pull this front panel off and i'd inspect all my solenoids the connections make sure there was no water intrusion there's no arcing going on and i would spray an additional little uh battery post protectant on the contacts just to preserve that and i've been doing that for the last six years absolutely had no problems but i'm going to make a confession here you know how i'm always saying perform pm preventive maintenance do preventive maintenance first to prevent things from happening in the first place right so here's the picture of my system inside here and these solenoids in here are known to go bad now over the years i've made a friend of a mechanic online and uh guy's a really sharp guy and we were discussing this and he said you know martin he said in these motorhomes these solenoids really should be changed out about every five to seven years he said if you have a ten year old coach you definitely need to change these out if you want to be proactive because if you don't you could do something as simple as drive into a gas station to go get gas then come back in the coach and go to start it up and it's not going to start these solenoids can go bad just like that without any warning so my confession is is i know better than that i should have changed these two or three years ago to be proactive but i got lucky this coach is 10 years old have had zero problems but now the house batteries are not being charged and that's a telltale sign that one solenoid has gone bad the others are probably getting uh ready to go bad too so i'm going in there today and changing everything all three solenoids and the relay now i'm 99 confident that what we're going to do today is going to fix my problem but even if it doesn't it doesn't matter these three solenoids and relay has to be changed before bigger problems start to arise so here are the parts we're going to replace today so these are the two outside solenoids one for the chassis battery and one for the house battery they're rated for a hundred amps each they are continuous solenoids and i paid 52 dollars each and these are in my amazon store this single post center solenoid is the auxiliary start solenoid amazon didn't have this particular one so i bought it from winnebago and paid 72 dollars and that included shipping and right below this one the center one you have the relay this is a five post tycho relay i also could not find this on amazon so i ended up finding it from an electrical supply house online and that was seventeen dollars including shipping so all in all all these parts were a hundred and ninety three dollars on this solenoid they have a warning label here and they're telling me that when i put the wires back on i have to hold this nut and the outside nut the compression nut that goes on here should not be more tightened more than nine foot pounds well my foot pound torque wrench is way long and it's a little too big for this confined area that we're going to be working in so i'm going to be using my inch pound torque winch which is a lot smaller so i converted nine foot pounds and that converts to a hundred and eight inch pounds but i'm not going to go all the way to nine pounds it says to not more than so i'm going to torque these to eight foot pounds and convert that to inch pounds and that's 96 inch pounds okay so i'll hold the nut put the wires on put the crimping nut on the outside here and tighten it to 96 inch pounds so even on these electrical parts they're calling for a proper torque i just covered that a little while ago when i did the main breaker box and the transfer switch remember and some people say ah that's not necessary just get in there well we covered all that it is necessary and we explained all that in the video that i did uh prior so torquing these is important now as you can see here this is really tight up in here but first we need to prepare the coach to work on it safely so we are disconnected from shore power remember that's important and the generator is not running now let's go back to the battery bay now we're going to disconnect the batteries if you take off the positive cable first you could create an electrical short especially if anything metal touches it so negative cable should always be removed first and replaced last so i'm going to disconnect the chassis battery and the house batteries okay so the batteries are all disconnected just about ready to get started here and this is a safety precaution because your system may be a little bit different than mine but we're going to take my multimeter and we're going to turn it to 12 volt all right so i'm going to take a probe positive and put it to ground and check this other post over here i have no power anywhere so it's safe to work on got my rubber gloves on as usual my arm protectors and for those of you who don't know what these are these are tube socks that i buy at walmart and i take and cut them off at the heel and i slide them on to protect my arms constantly enriching on stuff just like this get scratches and gouges on my arms this protects my arms you can see i have all my tools i've anticipated every all the tools that i'm going to need including my inch pound torque wrench so everything is right here it should go fairly smoothly and before we get started i just wanted to remind everybody and thank everybody that uses my amazon store everything that i use in a video any video those parts and gear are in my amazon store but what is so awesome is so many of you loyal fans every time you need something at amazon you'll click my amazon store link first to go to amazon and if you need gear well fine you can shop for gear in my store or just shop on amazon for anything that you normally would get on amazon put it in the cart and check out using my amazon store to shop for whatever you need is a great way to say thank you martin thank you for taking the time to doing these videos and helping the rv community so i want to thank you all so much those of you who are new to my channel the link to my amazon store is down there in the description text so thank you guys so much for wanting to support us using our store it's been this such a blessing okay i'm going to get started on the left solenoid joni what's the time right now 105. 105. okay the first problem i've ran into here this solenoid is mounted to the bay with two screws one here and one here so i tried to back that screw out and it was tighter than all get out on the back of the bay here and those screws have nuts on them and i put some penetrating oil on those and went to break these nuts and those nuts just stripped out it's like they put loctite or something on these screws i mean they're just unbelievably tight so now what i'm going to have to do is i'm going to have to grind these all off so i just got to grinding off the first nut there and it went real smooth took me about a minute the way i ground those nuts off is with my handheld grinder and yes i do keep this with me so i went to the store and i got new nuts flat washers lock washers and nuts and as i was going to the store i got the thinking i want to show you something here these are my good wrenches here and i got to looking at this and that wrench is bigger than this nut so even after i put the wires on here and put that outside nut i'm not going to be able to torque that nut down right because this wrench is too thick so while i was at the store i bought a cheap set of wrenches and i'm going to take this half inch wrench and i'm going to grind it down right here so it'll be thin enough to hold that nut and not interfere with me torquing this correctly so i got the second nut ground off and i just wanted to point out i wore my long sleeve shirt and i asked joanie she gave me her her winter cap because as i'm grinding those sparks are all flying around and i want to protect my hair and my body and here is the first solenoid right here so i'm going to take my needle nose pliers and that's on that back post right there so i'm going to take a little bit of dielectric grease and put it on this spade connector here this doesn't help conduct electricity but what it does do is it keeps moisture out and makes it easier to remove and insert in so i'm going to put that back up in there and it's locked into place and then i'm going to take my fuse and go ahead and put it in here and then take my other fuse on this side and push it in and once again just make sure that these wires are good and seated and they are then i'm going to take some never seas and put it on there with a flat washer and this will go inside like this and bolt this way and i'll put the nut the flat washer and a locking washer on the back side okay so we got the two new mounting bolts there and that solenoid now is mounted and now what i'm going to do is hook up the wires back up to there so i got this first solenoid all in and these torqued here now i'm going to move to the center solenoid and i'm going to leave those mounting bolts on there until i get these big lugs broken loose okay so i got the center auxiliary solenoid uh replaced so now i'm moving over to the right solenoid okay so i got all three solenoids replaced and the last thing i need to do is replace this relay look how loose this is this is the circuit it plugs into and this is the relay itself so i'm going to pull this relay out i'll show you what that looks like underneath there so i pulled the relay out it's a five prong relay and look how loose this is it's held on with a screw right here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to back that screw out and i'm going to put some blue loctite on there and screw that back in but the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take this and i'm going to take some electroclean and i'm going to clean out those contacts in there so now i'm going to take some blue loctite not red and that's really too much all you need is just about that much right there i'm going to put that back through there i've been down here troubleshooting this unit and i tightened this relay up before it got loose again so that's why i've decided that i need to put loctite in here we don't need to have this relay harness bouncing around while underway right okay that's good and tight now we'll take the relay and put it in here and snap it down inside there's all the new studs and the nuts and what i'll do is i'll come back and i will wipe all this down with acetone and paint this so it doesn't rust okay well that looks really good right now uh what's the time jony 4 20 4 20. so even going to the store and coming back and having to grind all those bolts off and all of that uh hour of what three hours and 15 minutes so now what we're going to do we're going to go hook the batteries back up okay so remember we're still unplugged from shore power so our house batteries are still at 12.5 i've hooked up the batteries both the house and the chassis battery now and i made sure that my chassis battery is on and my house batteries are on so let's go start the coach now that i've started the engine you can see my scan gauge is recording right here we are charging at 14.2 volts and my house battery digital readout is also saying 14.4 volts now okay so let's verify this uh on the batteries themselves with my multimeter so we're going to put the positive probe there negative probe on the back and look there 14.4 volts on the chassis battery that's good now let's do the house batteries so we're going to put the positive probe on there negative over here and we're getting 14.4 volts so the alternator is now charging both sets of batteries like it's supposed to be and this is why i say guys you guys can do this stuff 80 to 90 of the maintenance and the pm items and upgrades that your rv needs you guys can do this stuff and save a boatload of money that just costed me what 193 bucks in parts i think is what it was and that took me what three and a half hours we'll just say four and that included me going to the store and back so remember if your solenoids and that isolation area don't make the mistake that i did and hey everything's working great don't need to look at it no those things do fail and i happen to get a quick heads up by my house batteries not charging i could have gotten stranded somewhere luckily i did not now like i said there are several different ways these different systems work i mean they have the same outcome but there's little differences in in all of them i don't pretend to be an expert or know all of them so please don't send me a comment or a question asking me to help troubleshoot your particular system you need to do what i do you need to get online and study your system so you know your system and if something like this comes up with yours you're going to know exactly the part numbers to use how to check different things and how to perform a replacement parts on your coach just make learning a priority in your life that's it if you want to learn more about how to take care of your rv or install upgrades just click my logo right under this video and that will take you to my youtube home page on my home page you'll see the playlist tab click that and every video i've ever done will be right there on that page in different categories or as another option you see that magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner click inside there and type what you're looking for if i've done a video on that subject it will list it anyway guys that's it for now i hope this video will help you solve some of the problems that you may be having with your batteries charging from the alternator so until next time this is rv street stick around [Music] you

Channel: RVstreet

Views: 27,996

Keywords: class a motorhome alternator, rv house batteries not charging, B.I.R.D, B.I.R.D and BIG Boy, B.I.M, battery isolator solenoid, rv house batteries, bad solenoids, motorhome boost switch, motorhome house batteries, failed solenoid, rv battery relay, rv house batteries wont charge, motorhome charging problems, motorhome battery solenoids not working, battery solenoids, house batteries bad, battery isolator replacement, rv batteries, auxiliary battery switch, class a charging

Id: UnYM111GLL8

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 03 2022