Why I Removed The RV Battery Disconnect.

so this is the location and the style of our battery disconnect that came with our rv there's a few reasons why i'm not a fan of this [Music] how's it going i'm jared gillis welcome to another all about rvs today we're talking about why i removed our rv battery disconnect inside of the rv so this is the disconnect that our rv came with that is supposed to disconnect the power coming from the batteries to the rest of the rv i have a few problems with this one one where it was mounted number two i didn't like the way it was installed it didn't turn everything off to the rv and number three i don't really care for the mechanism the way that it works so an rv battery disconnect is what it's supposed to do is you have power coming in and power going out and when you flip this switch and you pull this little key out it's supposed to stop the power coming from your batteries to the rest of the rvs so if you needed to work on something or if you're putting it in storage you want to turn off any supply of power leaving your batteries so you can save it and not have it be drained and depleted that's the point of having an rv battery disconnect so with that purpose in that description they should all be wired up pretty much the same way but the problem was in ours is when you disconnect it and you pulled this pin out it didn't turn power off to everything in the dc system in the rv some things were still wired to the battery bank so it would still deplete it or i would still have power in some areas so having something that only kills off half of the the battery power going out doesn't really work for me so when i want to disconnect the power i want everything disconnected now the bigger problem for me is having this located in here in the main storage area so it was right here on the wall and you can see at that height if i'm to pull out this bin it's going to release that if i bump that in any way and you may not even notice it when it first happens so trying to track down why we have dc power in some places and not others can really be a pain so it only takes once or twice doing that before you know to check this first but just having that be able to turn off so easily is a problem that i would like to avoid the other thing is the back of this is exposed so if it's behind a panel where there's nothing else behind it it's going to be fine but if i'm having it in this shared wall that goes to another storage on the other side there had to be a protective barrier to be able to have these hot wires not be connected to anything else so that was pretty easy to fix if we move over to this switch this is what i have enjoyed and liked and it's worked really well for us it's because it's all enclosed so even if i just replaced with this one where that one was at i'm gonna gain a couple of things i prefer to move it closer to the battery and have everything in one place and not have the switch get beat up in my storage compartment moving stuff in and out and have it a little bit more protected but if i were to mount this in that same spot i have the ability to keep that all in this bay and it's all going to be protected in this box and the great thing about this switch is just really easy to see this is off this is on and it allows you to easily switch it and it's not something that's going to catch easily more like this lever is going to be inside of the storage bay now what i could have done as a really simple solution is i could have just installed this switch on the opposite side it would have removed it from that storage bay but i still wouldn't have been able to have all loads on just one switch without rewiring it but it would have removed it out of the storage bay and given me the switch that i prefer the good thing is these are really affordable too so 14 bucks we were able to put one that we like and put it in a location that works better for us in our rv so i also mentioned that we want to be sure that our trailer brake system is able to connect to the batteries and it's not getting turned off or on we leave this in the on position when we're towing it keeps the brakes working it keeps the battery charged up from the truck while we're driving so yes we did remove this but we did replace it with something that i think is better easier to use and has less chance for having a problem with by not having in a location that's easy to bump or having a mechanism that is easy to disengage for me it's a definite win being able to go to this it's just easy to work so we have this one that connects to everything inside of the rv every single load except for the inverter we have a larger switch that goes to the inverter that can handle the higher amperage so we just have two disconnects one that disconnects it from the entire rv and one to the inverter the other thing that i like about this unit is it's just easy to mount and it has different ways that you can bring in the wire so if you wanted to bring the wire from the side you could pull this little access panel off then you can have the wires come in and connect the terminals you have those access points on all four sides so you can configure it however you like and then it has easy mounting that connects this plate to the back and then you can screw it to the wall we have it connected to that divider in between our two storage bays and we don't have any wires dangling into the next bay that we have to protect it's all connected on one bay and it keeps it nice and clean and simple another question that i often get asked when talking about disconnects is should you put this on the positive or negative side of the battery i put it on the positive side it really doesn't matter i like disconnecting from the positive side but when i'm disconnecting wires from the battery i disconnect the negative side first i want to remove the wires from the negative side of the battery first the the thought behind that is if you're disconnecting from the positive side first and you have a wrench on there and you contact the frame of the rv it's going to be a large arc it can be dangerous you don't want to cause some kind of arcing situation like that so if you disconnect the negative side and you contact the frame it's really not a big deal because your negative side is already connected to the frame so disconnect the negative side and then disconnect the positive side when you're doing the battery so adding one of these switches to your rv is pretty simple for us we have a more complex system because of the inverter and we've done diagrams on that but the principle is going to be the same as if i was just adding it to any rv one side is going to connect to the battery bank so one wire going from the switch to the battery bank and then the other side is everything that was connected to the positive side of the battery previously so that'll have all the rv loads on the other side of the switch but in a nutshell that is really the main reasons why we switched over to a switch like this is because it's just simple we have less problems with bumping it i like the install process of this and we can disconnect everything inside of our rv by wiring this properly so i hope that helps you guys out if you're interested in getting a switch like this there'll be a link down in the description you can go check it out it's around 14 but i would do this again in a heartbeat so i think that's gonna do it for today i hope you guys enjoyed this video i hope it helps you out with your rv and your rving process so if you guys like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to see more videos about rving hit that subscribe button and if we don't see you on the road hopefully we will see you next video [Music]

Channel: All About RV's

Views: 145,416

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, Learn To RV, RV Knowledge, RV Life, AllAboutRVs, Allaboutrv’s, RV Tips, RVing Tips, RV Disconnect, RV Battery Disconnect, Dead RV Battery, Disconnect battery, How to disconnect RV battery

Id: xwJhYZ_ODng

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021