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Old 11-29-2014, 09:58 PM   #11
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Re: House battery performance?

Quote:
Originally Posted by mikracer
the separator allows current from the house battery to assist in starting the van when the starter batteries drop below a certain point.
Stock SMB wiring is to connect the house batteries EVERY TIME YOU TURN THE KEY.

It hides starter battery problems until you cannot start at all. Remove the green wire to fix... at least it was green in my build.

Tracy, I'd have your alternator tested. In the 15 minutes I drove with a bad alternator and new batteries I had a bunch of corrosive "growth", more than I'd ever seen (although mine didn't destroy the battery). My van has been eating starter batteries and I've always had problems with the house side as well- pretty sure my alternator was overcharging the whole time I've owned the van, and only recently did it stop putting out the volts which alerted me to the problem.

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Old 11-29-2014, 10:19 PM   #12
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Re: House battery performance?

Quote:
Originally Posted by jage
Quote:
Originally Posted by mikracer
the separator allows current from the house battery to assist in starting the van when the starter batteries drop below a certain point.
Stock SMB wiring is to connect the house batteries EVERY TIME YOU TURN THE KEY.

It hides starter battery problems until you cannot start at all. Remove the green wire to fix... at least it was green in my build.

Tracy, I'd have your alternator tested. In the 15 minutes I drove with a bad alternator and new batteries I had a bunch of corrosive "growth", more than I'd ever seen (although mine didn't destroy the battery). My van has been eating starter batteries and I've always had problems with the house side as well- pretty sure my alternator was overcharging the whole time I've owned the van, and only recently did it stop putting out the volts which alerted me to the problem.

So jage, did your dash gauge ever show the charging as being high? Not sure how accurate it might be but I have owned cars in the past that when the alternator either over charged or under it was accurate enough to notice an issue. My van does stay outside in the summer time so the solar panel is always charging, if the starting batteries were bad wouldn't they continue to want to take a charge and not let the charge controller fade off from charging them? Might be one reason for all the corrosion, but the batteries were very old my guess is the second set for the van its a 2005.
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Old 11-30-2014, 08:37 PM   #13
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Re: House battery performance?

AGM's and wet cell battery types have slightly different charging requirements. I might be off target on this but I think it kind of produces an electrolysis between the battery types when bank together. I had issues like this on my bass boat. But even if you think about it, what would happen if you put a 6 or more amp charge to a wet maintenance battery? It might not boil the battery but would supply so much of a charge that the water would evaporate off over time. Maintenance free batteries are just typical wet cell batteries that can't be opened to add water... well really you can but forget about that. The problem is exposed cells short out. Take a standard car battery charger and put it on a maintenance free battery for several months. I burned up a lot of wet cell batteries just because I exposed the plates. OK I was lazy and didn't follow up on maintenance. Thank God for AGM's.
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Old 12-01-2014, 05:41 PM   #14
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Re: House battery performance?

Had the house battery charging yesterday on a high charge rate. 14.4 plus volts for about 4 plus hours. Shut that off and it leveled off around 13.0 12.9 volts. Today I went to check it out and its sitting at 12.7 Its hard to think that a couple small led lights as previously mentioned would be enough to draw that much off of that big battery? Could be that the battery settled a bit lower after the charger was shut off? Oh well, Im just going to keep an eye on it, maybe do some testing with a bigger draw on it and see what it does.
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