Starting battery goes dead

The advantage of the Trik-L-Start is one way charging. So you can not by accident drain the chassis batteries.

TNGW1500SE,
Nice bike by the way, always liked those. Anyway, do yourself a favor, spend the $45 or so for the Trik-L-Start and be done with it. It's totally automatic, takes care of your chassis batteries WITHOUT you even being around to think about controlling the situation 'cause, all the "thinking" is done for you.
Scott

I 2nd the battery maintainer. I did this on my old DP, but I used a super-duper cheap deal from harbor freight.

https://www.harborfreight.com/automatic-battery-float-charger-42292.html

Worked really well. Wouldn't charge it from dead, but if you put it away charged/mostly charged, you'd be topped off when you needed it again.

I'm not officially recommending a $10 battery maintainer, although I did use them on MANY MANY things with great success, a better quality one is probably a better choice.

Brian

Direct wire is fine until you forget it once and discharge all batteries when camped off-grid. And still if you can get the generator started it matters even less... just charge them up.

YC 1 wrote:
That will work just fine. If you want some fun, install a 12 volt tail light bulb or dome light inline and if the engine battery is low the bulb will glow until the two batteries come to the same level. It acts as a current limiting device although not needed and just a fun thing for me to do on my last RV until I installed the Trik-l-start.

I have that hooked up now and the bulb is getting dimmer as time goes by. If this worked for you, why buy the Trik-l-start? All you'd need is a switch on this to stop any discharge when boondocking.

While a Trik-L-Start is great, a simple jumper wire is a cheap and easy way to keep both battery banks charged while in storage; I do exactly that. Disconnecting your chassis battery means you lose all of your radio presets/clock, etc.

Trik-L-Start works inna garage

JM2¢ ~~ YMMV

i installed a trick-l-start and it works great. Before that, My starter battery would die while on shore power every time. I was replacing batteries offten. The best thing about the trick-l-start is that I can listen to the car audio without killing the battery. When I store it, I either plu it in, or I disconnect the battery.

pianotuna wrote:
Trik-L-Start and some solar!

It's in a garage.

FIRE UP wrote:

TNGW1500SE wrote:
My starting battery is going dead when parked and while plugged in. The house batteries stay charged. The starting battery doesn't get charged.

Is there any reason why I just couldn't connect the house batteries to the starting battery with a jumper wire on the positive terminal just for when it's parked in the winter? I could install an inline fuse in the wire. They are both connected to the frame on the negative side.

Any reason not to?

It would be nice to know the make/model/year/engine/chassis of the coach we're talking about. For instance, Winnebago coaches from late '05 down, especially the diesel ones, were not equipped with any form of chassis battery charging while on shore power. But, in '06, Winne started installing a unit called the Trik-L-Start. It's NOT A BATTERY CHARGER! It's simply a control unit that when conditions are met, it will siphon off, SOME of the charging intended towards the house batteries, to be re-directed to the chassis batteries, at a maximum rate of 5 amps.

So, this is why I ask about the year/make etc.
Scott

2003 Itasca Sunova 30B