Is my water pump going bad?
Howdy, I bought a 1989 18' Terry Resort TT a little over a year ago. Most of our camping so far has been with full hookups, but there's been a night or two of dry camping here and there. On our...
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mtnbbud wrote:westend wrote:
Do you leave the battery connected between uses with no charging present? If so, the parasitic draws from alarms, circuit boards, and entertainment devices will drain it within a week or two. The solution is to wire in a disconnect switch or remove a cable from a terminal. If the battery has been in this situation for a long time, there is a good chance that some sulfation has taken place and capacity has been lost.
Being new to a TT, I've been taking all the advice I can get. On the advice of my brother, I have been storing the battery in the back of my garage hooked to what I believe is this battery charger/maintainer. (My dad has assured me I don't have to unplug the battery from the charger after the battery is fully charged.) Before that, I started manually unhooking the wires from the battery when the trailer was in storage.
I did leave the battery hooked up in the trailer overnight when I got back from camping Sunday night.
I'm slowly learning. It's been a lot of fun and my wife is finally camping with me again after I could no longer talk her into tent camping like we used to do when she was younger :)
After doing some more reading, I'm starting to think running the furnace at night did run the battery down quicker than I expected. If that's the case, I'm toying with the idea of buying a small gas generator to charge the battery and possibly bring along my smaller deep cycle battery that I have for my electric boat motor as a back-up. I'll need to experiment with using the Mr Heater instead of the furnace also.
The charging regimen is a good one. Batteries like to browse on some sort of charge. In the future, you may wish to look at adding some solar to the trailer. It eliminates a lot of the fussing with batteries.
Your assumption about the furnace being a hog is spot on. Measurement with a multimeter will confirm the power consumption rate. At some point, you may also wish to get a float hydrometer. They are a true measurement of battery health.
Good luck with your 12V system, it sounds like you are off to a good start.
