RV BATTERIES - WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS DEAD?! What I learned... RV MASTERS

[Music] so I want to do a really basic kind of module on batteries understanding batteries I don't want to get super technical and scientific on you there's plenty of information out there for that but I'm gonna get you the what you need to know now batteries are I mean obviously they're the source of power for our coaches when I first got my coach I made a lot of mistakes thinking that my batteries were dead they were bad I took it back to the manufacturer back to the battery vendor and I was fighting for batteries and I replaced my batteries three times and it actually turned out I was just misunderstanding battery use and I think that a lot of us do so batteries actually take especially the deep-cycle batteries they take a long long time to charge so let's say you have a trailer for example and you save yourself oh the battery charges while I'm driving so I don't have to worry about the battery I'm just gonna plug it in we have a three-hour drive it's gonna be fine no it's not going to be fine the charge that you get from that that's a trickle charge it's not going too deep charge those batteries a real battery needs 24 to 48 hours to properly charge especially on a 3-stage charger and so a lot of times we're operating operating with batteries that are much more dead than we think they are a 12 volt battery is close to 13 volts really and so when you get down to about 12 point 2 volts you actually are ready to consider you're considered a dead battery at 12 point - when I look at a 12 volt battery well it's 12 volts it's fine no it's dead and if you go below the 80% mark like if you're discharged more than 20% if you get down to that 80% you will start doing physical damage to the battery and shortening its life if you let it get down below about twelve point two to twelve point one volts if you're letting that battery run down to eleven and a half and ten volts before you charge it up you are shortening the life of that battery so best practice is we get a 20% discount about twelve point three volts we kick it back up we charge that thing right back up to 13 13 to whatever it can take so just know that it takes a long time to charge batteries 12 volts is dead 13 volts 12.8 that's that's a charge that's where you want to be so here's a way that I teach you know conceptually how to think about battery charging all right so imagine that we have this pasture and this big green field this big pasture and we've got this white gate and we swing that gate open and we have all these cattle we're gonna take those cattle and we're gonna jam them in as fast as we can right you just shove them in shove them in shove them in we closed we closed the gate now if I was standing at that gate and I couldn't see over the cattle if I was standing I level two the gate that pasture would look full to me I would think wow the pastures full of cattle but that's because they're all bunched up right here at the front okay if I open that gate right away what's gonna happen I'm losing all those cattle fast right now what if I keep that gate closed and I give it 24 hours the cattle are gonna start to spread out now if I open that gate I'm just gonna lose them a little bit at a time they're just gonna trickle out if I do that that is how battery's charged and you first plug in and you get that bulk charge that bulk charge is jamming amperage in there as hard as it can trying to try to charge it up and what some people mistake is when it first gets charged up there they're charged up for an hour or two or three they put a reading on it and it says hey it's full I'm at 12:19 fantastic are we really at 12 nine or is that just a surface charge there is such a thing called a surface charge the problem with a surface charge is that as soon as you you draw power on it it's gone so you don't really have 12.9 it'll look like it's full 12.9 and as soon as you flip a light on it's 11 7 and you're like what just happened well it was a surface charge just like all those cattle were right at the front you really didn't have a full pasture so you want to plug those batteries in the day before your trip or to run it off the house you know plug that battery and let the short cord charge up those batteries well before you go out on trip then when you're driving that short cord or the the umbilical cord to the tow vehicle that's just kind of surface charging and keeping those topped off so just remember that you know just just in order to deep charge those batteries we need time and we don't want to see all the cattle up there at the front of the gate we need to give them time to get out there you need to give your battery time to charge and let it do its job now there's of course fancy words and science behind all of this lots of YouTube videos out there to explain this from a scientific perspective but for most of us I'm just trying to give the conceptual hey it takes a while to charge batteries that's a little bit of an explanation on why they might look like they're charged but they're not so just understand you do want to learn more about your battery health and this will get you started

Channel: RV Masters

Views: 223,679

Keywords: rv driving, battery, rv battery, newbie rv, how to rv

Id: hx6NwLzIeGw

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019