Battery dead

OP here. Thanks for all the input. I think that my monitor panel probably is not giving me an accurate battery charge reading. It only seems to read 100% fully charged or 0% and completely discharged.
I reread the small manual that came with the trailer. The converter is a Parallax 7300 rated at 55 amps. There is very little additional info contained in the small manual.
My Honda genny is a model 1984 EX650 super quiet. The thing still starts first pull. It even got stolen once and police said I would never see it again. Next day police recovered it and they brought it back to me and only had a couple scratches on it. I now have a kind of sentimental attachment to that thing. My wife wants me to get a new Honda or Yamaha 2000W so that she can run her hairdryer or microwave. Thanks for all your input and I am open to any more suggestions. BTW I just saw MiRV has an excellent posting on batteries. Maybe I'll learn something. thanks, Dale

What's the model of that converter?

It may be a single stage... or a multi-stage model that is difficult to get it to shift into high gear.

I believe a Progressive Dynamics PD9260 (60A) is rated at 1000W going full out.

As others have mentioned, that genny of yours wouldn't keep up with a 60A PD nor a multi-stage 55 Amper. If the bank is low, even a 55A single stage should run at full rated power. So something's amiss, here.

Regardless, I echo the sentiment that your battery indicator is likely worthless. If you want to use voltage, the bank needs to be free of any draw and rested for at least a half hour and ideally an hour or better.

A glass hydrometer and thermometer are the best ways to determine true state of charge. A glass hydrometer can be had at O'Reilly's for about 5 bucks. Temperature can be estimated to get you close. Then a state-of-charge chart like the one below will give you the real story.

Gale Hawkins wrote:

ScottG wrote:
With that amount of charging all you did was put a surface charge on it - which is enough to make the top light on your control panel light up.

That sounds like the case to me. I think two hours would be on the short side.

X2

ScottG wrote:
With that amount of charging all you did was put a surface charge on it - which is enough to make the top light on your control panel light up.

That sounds like the case to me. I think two hours would be on the short side.

With that amount of charging all you did was put a surface charge on it - which is enough to make the top light on your control panel light up.

I use a volt meter and would test my batteries daily to monitor the discharge. When in conserve mode and no generator to recharge, we will use about 8-10% of battery power each day. 5 days max so far.

My batteries drop to around 12.0VDC (Apprx 50% charge state) over night with our planned usage when camping off the power grid. The next morning when allowed to run our generator we will connect the trailer shore power cable directly to the generator 120VAC receptacle using a RV30A-15A adapter cord (WALMART). Then we have to run our generator for a good three hours to bring our battery bank back up to their 90% charge state so we can do this all over again for the next day/night run off the batteries. Doing it this way the generator provides the 120VAC power to run our on-board smart mode PD9260C converter/charger which produces the required 20AMPS per battery of DC Charge to re-charge our battery bank with-in the short three hour time frame allowed.

We can do around 12-14 of the these 50% to 90% charge state cycle before having to do a full 100% charge state to get back our full performance of the batteries. A full 100% charge state for us takes around 12 hours of generator run time which of course is usually not allowed at most of the camp sites we go to here on the east side of the US. This is usually when we head back for the house...

Like indicated above just using the 8AMP DC charge cable that comes with some of the generators that you can clip to the battery terminals will not do much for charging batteries if they have been discharged down to the 50% or lower charge state..

My 255AH battery bank requires 14.4VDC with the capacity of around 60AMPs DC current to use smart mode charging technology (Boost Mode) to return my battery bank back up to around 90% charge state in a three hour time period. This is battery science at play here - not many ways (if any) to get around the process...

Roy ken

The only way to accurately know SOC is with a battery monitor Trimetric or Victron which measures all current going into and coming out of your batteries.

Hard to say without a lot more information on your actual power use age and the charge profile of that converter. But generically speaking running a 650 watt generator for 2 hours every other day (average of 1 hour/day) is not fully recharging your batteries or anywhere near. Even under very lightly loaded conditions you would need to hold your battery voltage at around 14.4 volts for 2 hours a day to get close to 100% charged each day. If you really operated the way you said you did you got outstanding performance from those batteries and charger

No, the factory charge indicators are not good and border on useless for boondocking like you did. Get a multimeter and measure voltage directly. Lots and lots of posts on this forum by very knowledgeable people on battery charging.

Are you sure you don't mean parallax 55 'AMP' rather than watt??... With a discharged battery, I would be surprised if a 660w genney with an output of say approx 5.4 amps could power a charger of that size. A 55 amp charger would likely take about 770 watts of power supply...My guess, the genny output circuit had tripped...Solution, Get a smaller charger or a larger genny...