Battery maintainer
Any recommendations on the best battery maintainer. I see some plug into an auxiliary 12V socket on the dash and some you have to clip onto the vehicle battery. How do people get on maintaining the...
Forum Discussion
Almot wrote:
Thanks SMK. I understand Trikl-start is not really "charging", but rather feeding the starter battery off the house battery? At least, this is what the diagram shows:
So, the house battery would cycle a little deeper in storage, because of this lost energy.
Not really, at least not to any great extent. The Trik-L-Start (as I understand it) would only be active if the voltage in the house 12V system is above a threshhold of ca. 13V or so, which basically means when the converter or a solar charger or something is providing power. When that's happening, it's not discharging the house battery any, just possibly preventing it from charging quite as quickly. (If it's already basically charged, then it's just the converter providing a little more power and the house battery seeing nothing at all different.)
When the converter is not on, the only additional load on the house system is the standby current used by the Trik-L-Start, which is apparently a few mA. Eventually it would run down the house battery, just like any other slight "phantom" load, at a little faster rate than just the house battery self-discharge.
