Stereo on Coach or House Batteries

I spoke with Monaco tech support yesterday.

They said they don't hook up the radio to the house batteries due to excessive noise caused by flourescent lights, etc.

They say they have had stereos in coaches with the memory keep alive lead hooked to the chassis batteries and the key on lead hooked to the house. When one bank was low it would fry the stereo as current would pass through it. :E

At this point the stereo is on the chassis batteries and I put the power lead to to Kenwood amp on the house batteries.

vacuumbed wrote:

rk911 wrote:
I can't imagine that a solid state stereo would draw enough amps to drain the coach batteries. have you checked your batteries? connections tight and clean? are you certain the genny is applying a charge? personally, I would rather the house batteries go dead than the starter battery.

I have installed a Kenwood Excelon XR-4S 4-channel car amplifier — 120 watts RMS x 4 at 4 ohms. This thing sucks power.

wow. well, I was ASSuming that we were talking about a standard RV stereo unit not something that would vibrate windows at 15-paces. ;)

rk911 wrote:
I can't imagine that a solid state stereo would draw enough amps to drain the coach batteries. have you checked your batteries? connections tight and clean? are you certain the genny is applying a charge? personally, I would rather the house batteries go dead than the starter battery.

I have installed a Kenwood Excelon XR-4S 4-channel car amplifier — 120 watts RMS x 4 at 4 ohms. This thing sucks power.

Our Monaco also has a switch on the dash that changes the radio from chassis to house batteries.

rk911 wrote:
I can't imagine that a solid state stereo would draw enough amps to drain the coach batteries.

Now you would think that wouldn;t you.

10 watts per channel needs 15-20 watts per channel to operate plus a bit for other stuff, perhapos 50 watts. That's 4 amps and change, Starting batteries are often only around 80 amps and like to be 80 pecent full so you have only about 20 amp hours to play with (yes I know the math looks a bit odd but we are going to burn it over a 4 hour period) and now you have dead batteries.

Add a 150 watt amplifier and we are now talking minutes.

My coach has 3 steros

Dash.. Chassis battery

House 120vac

Bedroom 120vac

In my 2001 Monaco knight the radio draws off the chassis batteries. So now I have a Trick-l-start as it seems I do not have any other system charging those batteries.

I can't imagine that a solid state stereo would draw enough amps to drain the coach batteries. have you checked your batteries? connections tight and clean? are you certain the genny is applying a charge? personally, I would rather the house batteries go dead than the starter battery.

Mine has a switch on it, that when in the normal position has the stereo on the coach starting battery, and it turns off and on with the ignition just like a car stereo. Flip the switch the other way and it's powered by the house batteries and is completely independent of the ignition switch.

That lets me use it like a car stereo when we're travelling, but like a home stereo when we're camping.