Quote:
Originally Posted by medicfernando
Hello all. I have had my van for a couple of years and have some lingering questions that were never clear to me from the previous owner that I want to have cleared. It has a Xantrex 2000 watt inverter/charger installed by SMB factory and a 4d size house battery.
1) When my van is parked, not in use, should it always be plugged in to shore power? If so, do I need to "able" the charger at the control panel or will the battery trickle charge automatically?
2)When plugged into shoreline when out camping, in order to use the shoreline power I need to flip the house breakers on, right? If the breakers are off, is it still running on house battery power?
I want to make sure that I am maintaining my house battery in the best way possible. Any other tips are greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot! Cheers!
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It depends on the load, whether or not you have parasitic loads, if you have solar, and how long you leave the vehicle parked. AGM batteries have a very low discharge rate and can hold a full charge for over a month. When plugged into shore power my inverter supplies 12v to the system as a low amp power supply. It's not a charge voltage but it's enough to keep power to some of the 12v draw that is constantly on. So at night my separator sees a 12.8+ volt power supply voltage. I can't run a heavy load without it pulling the voltage on the battery down where it drops the voltage enough that the separator opens, but all that is running in those circumstances are the detectors. The way I feel about it is that my solar takes the batteries into the float level while the sun is up and then all night the inverter acts as a power supply. Being the fridge detects AC power, there is no DC draw from it when it's on. To tell the truth, being the detectors pull such a low amount and really don't cycle the batteries that much, I don't feel it's even necessary to plug into shore power if my fridge is off and I don't have a DC load applied. YMMV. Because I use my van at least a couple times a week I figure that the solar is enough to keep things up.
If I want to run something that has a ample DC draw parked on shore power (like my Espar units) I'll throw the inverter into the charge mode. At the times I do want to enable the charger to charge the batteries, I always check and monitor the charging session to make sure the rate ramps down to an amp or so after the load has been shut down and the batteries are fully charged up. These chargers can produce quite a bit of amperage is something goes wrong. As long as the amperage drops to about an amp or two, I don't see an issue with keeping it on provided the batteries are cool enough to accept a charge w/o causing damage. Mine has a temp probe on the battery bank.
I never turn off my AC breakers because the inverter automatically passes through the power if the inverter is set not to invert. [edit] The only DC breakers I have are for protection and I never touch them either. I know some people have a "master" DC switch that is meant to kill all the devices in the conversion. If set up correctly it shouldn't affect the charging but would have to look at a schematic to say for sure.
Hope this helps.
Dave