TreeSeeker wrote:
You will definitely have parasitic drains on your chassis battery caused by the radio, alarms, and the onboard engine computer among others. So, you will need some method of maintaining it’s charge while in storage. The Trik-L-Start is one way but I don’t trust it. It only charges the chassis battery when the house battery is above a certain voltage. So, if your chassis battery is discharging at a faster rate than the house battery, the chassis battery will never get charged enough.
However, to be fair I have never used one so I don’t have any practical experience with it. Maybe I don't understand exactly how it works (there is not much detail on this on their website).
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The Trik-L-Start is hardwired so you don’t have to do anything after that.
The Trik-L-Start will never work if you don't have some source of power charging the house battery, be it shore power (and the converter) or solar or whatever. That's not at all surprising, since the power to charge the chassis battery needs to come from somewhere, and the house battery can't supply that forever without discharging.
A charger, even when in float/maintenance mode, holds the voltage above 13V on the battery being charged. The house battery when so connected isn't being discharged at all; the parasitic loads are powered by the charger, not the battery. This is pretty easy to verify if one has a battery ammeter installed.
I don't have personal experience with the Trik-L-Start, but most everything I've read has been quite positive about how well it works for its designed use.
