Battery Life and Low Temps
I have been having a ball up at Iris Meadow off of Rock Creek Road, Close to Mammoth Lakes, CA. It's the steeper side of the Sierras just East of Yosemite. It's a little known area comparably, but v...
Forum Discussion
NinerBikes wrote:
For the first time, you used your 3 season TT in cold weather... says it all. I can tell you all about it, I was up in MT camped on the Madison River 7 miles inside MT on the Continental Divide. 17F in the morning 9-11-14... 26F inside the TT at 8 AM. Yeah... Brrrr cold.
You don't mention the amp capacity of your batteries. Or types of lights inside your travel trailer. Or voltage your charger puts out while recharging your batteries.
Suggestion... next pair of batteries, get a set of 6v Golf Cart batteries at Costco, and connect them in series for 12V and 210 Amp hours capacity.
Next, change out all your lights into LED's 48 SMD 1210 3624 mm versions from ebay. Warm White or cool white. Saves a ton of amps.
Third, you need something when running a generator that is a true battery battery charger that is a quick, high amp charger, if you run minimal time on a generator. Something that shoves the amps in there, in a short amount of time, to 90% charge or a bit more in 2 hours or slightly less. Something that bulk charges at at least 14.8V on those GC-2 batteries. Don't worry about boiling the batteries... ain't gonna happen dry camping, and they are industrial strength and tough as nails, they can handle it. Forget about your existing charge controller if it is a WFCO 8955... they sit at 13.6V trickle charge all day long on your generator, they are fine when hooked up to a pedestal, they are no good dry camping, Epic Fail.
That should do it. Get rid of the group 24 or 27 or 29 or 31 car batteries, next spring. Disconnect the batteries from the trailer circuit, and Top charge them to 15.0V when you get home. and then the following day, equalize charge them to either 1.285 Specific battery on each cell with a charger capable of 7.5 Amps and 16.0V and watch the voltage go up while baby sitting them, until it goes up to 16.0V, or SG reaches 1.285 and then shut it off. It might take 3 or 4 attempts at 16.0V over every other day applications to get all your cells to 1.285 or as high as possible, being fully disconnected from any electrical in your trailer.
Both my Yamaha gennies came with direct battery charging hardware. It tells you how to do it in the manual. I just hoped I'd never have to go to all that trouble with the TT. Oh, well.
I really want the series wired 6 volts. I have known about how much better they are for a while, but had always skated through. Till recently.
