House Battery Problems...
Our new-to-us 2001 Coachmen Leprechaun has an electrical issue that has me stumped. The house battery and converter that it came with where not producing adequate voltage and an RV tech that was working on something else told me to replace both and my problems should go away. I put in a Powermax PM3-55 and a couple good lead-acid batteries. Should have been good, right? While plugged in to shore power (sitting in our driveway) the coach voltage started to drop off and the new batteries were getting discharged. Testing with the batteries disconnected, I get about 12.6 vdc coming out of the converter, while lights, fan and fridge are running. When hooked to the coach load, house voltage drops down to about 11.6 vdc. I traced it back to the fuse panel under the bed hoping to isolate/identify (maybe) a ghost load or high resistance short to ground. Nope. A good 12.6 vdc feed is going to the fuse panel, but when I connect it to the fuse panel, it drops to1 11.6 vdc. Pulling out one fuse at a time, I expected to see which circuit is pulling it down. Again, nope. It stayed low throughout that exercise.
So....I'm stumped.
Is my brand-new converter bad?
And can anyone tell me how a battery is supposed to charge while it is wired in parallel to the system load?
Should I change the setting on the converter to a constant voltage instead of the fancy 3-stage charging?
Any help would be much appreciated.
