RV Batteries What You Need To Know.

your RV batteries are one of those things that you just want them to work when you go to use them you want them to have enough power in them to do what you're hoping to do so today we're going to be talking about your RV batteries and what you need to know how's it going welcome to another all about RVs I'm jarred Gillis and if you couldn't tell by our name we really do love our being and it's it's our hope to be all the share information and help other people out so that they can enjoy RVing also so today we're gonna be talking about RV batteries the house batteries in your RV because we rely on our RVs to do so much and the batteries are no exception to that rule I mean we rely on our batteries for simple things like I awning as Manuel I have to put it in and out but so many awnings nowadays are electrical and we rely on them for the jacks on our RV for the slides to operate lights the water pump when you're off-grid the fridge when it's on propane uses a little bit of 12 volt and for our water heater to ignite and our furnace when we're using that off-grid so there's a lot of things we use our batteries for and what are our options for batteries and what do we need to do to take care of them properly so there's four options there's lots of different brands but there's there's four options for your battery in your rig you have your 12-volt battery that you can it's like a deep cycle 12-volt battery you can you can even pick these up at Walmart if you want to step it up from there you can go with a six volt golf cart battery if you want to step it up from there there's AGM batteries and then if you want to step it up from there there's lithium batteries out there so let's talk about some of these differences some of the differences some of the pros and cons and the maintenance that goes along with each of those types of batteries first off let's look at the amp our ratings on these batteries so that we can look at them fairly across the board now this is an easy concept to understand when you think about like a car your miles per gallon if you're just mashing on that gas pedal and you're just flooring it every chance you get you can pull up to a stoplight and you just floor it when it turns green and you're just going as fast as you possibly can compared to maybe somebody that drives a little more conservatively and isn't just mashing on the gas every chance they get it's easy to see the person that's mashing on the pedal is gonna get way less miles per gallon than somebody that's driving real conservatively driving just like a drill even you know let's say like 45 miles an hour on the highway they're gonna get much better gas mileage well it's the same way in batteries if you try and draw a lot out of your batteries at once you're not gonna get as many amp hours out of your battery so the majority of the time they try and put these batteries at a twenty hour rate so that means that they're gonna take the battery from from full and then twenty hours are gonna drain it and how many amp hours did they get out of that so if you had a hundred amp hour battery they drew five amps for 20 hours and they got a hundred amps out of that battery that's gonna help us compare these these batteries side-by-side now the other thing is they always talk about the depth of discharge so your depth of discharge is if you're at a hundred percent and you bring it down to fifty percent and then you go back up to a hundred and that's what they recommend that is the depth of discharge for that battery another thing is you know that your your RV is typically on a 12-volt system but I also mentioned six volt golf cart batteries so if you don't already know this you can wire those you'd have to buy a pair of six volt golf cart batteries but if you wire them in series you then get a basically a 12-volt battery bank so here's a quick rundown of the difference between parallel and series so if you had two 12-volt batteries and you're gonna wire them together to be one battery bank you're gonna tie the positive to the positive and then on the other side you're going to tie the negative to the negative and then you're going to connect your loads and charger on each of those batteries essentially what you have done is you created a battery bank so because you tied those together in parallel that's going to remain a 12-volt battery bank but then you add those amp hours together so let's just say that each of those was a hundred amp hours you now have a 200 amp hour battery bank now if we were to look at how we wire in series the six volt golf cart batteries to get them to 12 volts we're gonna wire them like I said in we're gonna take the positive of one battery and tie it to the negative of the other battery and then our load and our charger are then going to connect to those open and positive and negative loads so you've basically built just a big 12 volt battery so when you wire it in series you add the voltage together so the six plus the six gives you the 12 volts so that'll work in your RV and you don't add together the amp hours so if these batteries were 235 amp hours each it's still going to be a 235 amp hour bank now that we understand some of that stuff we can talk about how to compare some of these batteries so let's just start off with that 12 volt battery that you can go and pick up at Walmart and put in your RV so I think the pros to that type of a battery is it's easy to get and it's relatively inexpensive you can get like a 75 amp hour battery for about 75 bucks so these batteries are a bit of a hybrid they're they're decent at starting things and they're decent at deep-cycle and sometimes it's even hard to find that amp hour rating on the side because they're they're more of a hybrid type of a battery but if you buy a couple of the larger ones you can get close to 100 amp hour battery and if you buy two of them then you have a 200 amp hour battery bank now the depth of discharge on these batteries is 50% you don't want to bring these batteries past that 50% before you charge them back up because if you do you begin the process of sulfation and damaging the battery and that's one of the the leading causes for killing your battery is having that sulfation when you draw past that 50% so in a nutshell if you ended up buying two of them and you had a 200 amp hour battery bank you only really get to use 100 amp hours out of that battery bank now with this battery also we have some maintenance that goes along with them this is a lead acid battery they vent out of the top so if you have a container typically your rv's gonna have like a storage bin up front that's already vented or usually a bay that's dedicated for batteries it's already going to be vented so you don't really have to put too much thought into this just make sure you keep it in its position to be vented but we that it's going to be off gassing and with that it loses some of its fluid inside so then you have to check it ever so often and put that water level at the proper level because if you let it get too low then you're just gonna be killing your battery again and then replacing it long before you would ever want to now let's say you wanted to step it up and get some golf cart batteries so you're gonna have to buy those in pairs and they usually come around 215 amp hours 235 amp hours I mean the more amp hours yet usually the the taller they get so one of the drawbacks to these batteries if your battery storage compartment can't handle a taller battery these typically are taller but if you can handle a taller battery it's not a big deal at all now this battery is great at handling that deep discharge and cycle that our RVs usually go through but you still want to remember don't take it past that 50% it's the same as that 12-volt battery because if you take it below that point you're gonna do damage to your battery so take it to the 50% and then charge it back up so it's similar they're similar maintenance you want to ensure that that water level is going to be at the same the proper level that it needs to be at if you let it dry out you're just going to destroy that battery so those two things are the same you're usually going to get more amp hours more power out of a battery like this this is what they're designed to do so they they do it well now cost wise depending on if you're going for a certain brand or not they can be considerably more expensive than that 12-volt battery but there are some deals to be had out there there's lots of options in the golf cart battery so I know that we can pick one up for like 120 bucks for a hundred I gave the wrong information when I said it there it was a hundred and twenty-five dollars for a 235 amp hour battery so that's a pretty good deal one last thing that I almost forgot to mention with this battery is like the first one we also have to vent this battery this this battery needs to be vented to make sure that you don't build up any of those those toxic corrosive types of fumes now the next step up from here are the AGM batteries now let me show you a couple our neighbors rig has some AGM batteries here's this battery compartment it's kind of nice rig these are the AGMs and they're sealed there's nothing you can do to add water to them there's no maintenance and that's one of the things that people love about these AGM batteries so I would say first on the list of advantages is you don't have to do any more maintenance this is absorbed glass mat battery they're sealed no more maintenance no more checking water levels and because you don't have that water in there sloshing around you can actually mount these in other positions if you needed to do that for your battery bank another great thing about these batteries is they store better than the other two that we had talked about I should have mentioned it in that but when you put those other two the 12 volt and the 6 volt golf cart battery and storage they're gonna discharge just naturally they're just gonna lose some of their energy and then you have to check that because you don't want them going too low obviously but these AGM batteries they store better they don't lose as much as you store them as they just kind of sit there on the shelf so that is a good thing too and when you're ready to start charging them up they charge much faster than the other two so if you need to charge up your batteries quickly which is always a good thing they charge faster now you will need to get a converter charger to match this AGM style of battery because they take a different charge cycle than the other two but they charge much quicker now you might be looking at this list and thinking that's all advantages of where the cons to this battery well the cost pretty much doubles from those six volt golf cart batteries depending on the brand you get I'll put a link in the description but there's there's some on Amazon that you can get for around two hundred and fifty dollars a piece something like that so it starts stepping up there in price but there's a lot of advantage that come with it now let's move along to our last battery which is the lithium and and it's what we ended up going with we ended up choosing the battleborn lithium battery it's a hundred amp hour battery and we have two of them now with this battery there's still pros and cons but this battery is capable of some pretty amazing things they are extremely efficient if you were to forget about the twenty hour rate for the amp hour and you were to do it on a four hour rate this battery is still supposed to be 99 efficient so that is pretty amazing number two these batteries are lighter than the 6 volt golf cart batteries that we had before now those were close to like 65 pounds something like that these battleborn batteries they are 29 pounds each and they are about the same size as your typical just your normal battery so if you're just gonna drop them into the same place that you had your batteries previously they'll usually fit in that same place which is which is kind of handy and the size was kind of important to us because of where we're going to be putting them well let me show you what we're gonna put our batteries now we typically have this area right here that holds two batteries but now we're gonna put them down here in this basement area we have this weird little nook in between the the wall back there and the water tank start water tanks here in this basement and we really couldn't store anything it was always awkward nothing really fit in there but these batteries I can stack them and put them on their side back in here I talked about a born they said this configurations more than than fine for their batteries but I'm able to utilize that space now it actually gains just a little bit of storage so for me this works out pretty well I don't mind putting them in that position because they require zero maintenance there there's nothing that I have to do no water level or anything no venting needed at all also so it works great in that spot this Bay works really good for where we're putting our batteries because it it protects them from getting too hot and too cold you don't want these batteries getting too far on either extreme it's not good for them now talking about temperature this is something that I learned this week that if you let those other lead-acid batteries discharge and then they freeze you're you're destroying your battery also so if you're putting your RV and storage make sure that battery is charged because I guess a charged battery isn't gonna freeze like a discharged battery would now I saved one advantage to a couple along with a disadvantage so I know a lot of people are gonna say man those batteries are so much more expensive and they are it's a thousand dollars compared to the prices of the other batteries but what you get along with that is the life of the battery so the the cycles that it can handle the lead acid and the AGM those are typically going to last you for about a thousand cycles this lithium battery is gonna last you for three thousand cycles and once you hit that three thousand cycle point it goes to usually around it like a seventy-five to to an eighty percent capacity that you still have in that battery so you still have eighty percent of that battery going forward so the life expectancy if you were to do the math on all of it it pencils out if you're planning on using them a lot and especially for us when we live in our rig full-time it works out really well now another advantage these batteries have is they charge four times faster than your lead acid batteries now the last kicker with these batteries is the amp hour capacity now you look at it and it's just a hundred amp hours but we are no longer restricted by that 50% depth of discharge I can take these down a hundred percent I can take a full hundred amp hours out of these batteries so with the two of them I get a full 200 amp hours out of these batteries if I wanted to do that in an equivalent AGM battery I'd have to be looking at probably four AGM batteries for the footprint of these and we just don't have the space for that so for us these worked out great now that's basically the rundown of all these batteries and I don't think that there's a one size fits all for instance if you're somebody that goes from RV park the RV park and you're almost always plugged in then then maybe that 12-volt battery you can pick up at Walmart would work well for you because you're not really looking for a huge capacity to be off-grid but let's say you love getting out there and staying out there just as long as you can and that's your ultimate goal then lithium might be the best option for you now let me leave you with a few things that you want to keep in mind now I'm gonna put a link in the description to some of these things but I think a good battery monitor is always great to know how much you're putting in how much you're taking out so there's a link to that I think you should get away from a single-stage converter if that's what your RV has it's really bad for your batteries it's it's not efficient at charging them it'll boil them if you leave it plugged in too long and then you'll you'll kill your battery that way too so a good multistage converter is great we'll do a whole video on that you don't want to mix and match these different battery types in your battery bank you want to get the the same battery basically in the same lot because they have different resistances and whatnot so you want to have similar batteries bought at the same time same age and all that now those are some of the best things you can do to keep your battery to last is check the maintenance if your battery requires maintenance and watch how deep you discharge those batteries for the AGM and the lead acid so doing those things is really going to take care of your batteries don't let them die and though they'll serve you a decent amount of time a good long time so if you've liked this video and if it helped you out give it a thumbs up if you haven't already hit that subscribe button and if we don't see you on the road hopefully we'll see you in the next video so get out there and have some fun [Music]

Channel: All About RV's

Views: 1,233,352

Keywords: maintenance, vehicle, battery, automobile, terminal, electrical, electricity, RV, RV Battery, AGM Battery, 12 volt deep cycle, 12 volt, 6 volt, Golf Cart Battery, Lithium Battery, Battle Born, Dragonfly, RV Lithium, RV Lithium Battery, 12V LiFePO4, AMp hour, AMP Hour Battery, Wire Parallel, Wire Series, RV Maintenance, RV 101, RV four Seasons, RV know how, DIY RV, learn how to RV, Jared Gillis, Keep Your Day dream, All about RVs, less house more living

Id: ZJD19RogRtg

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 29 2018