Battery Issue

[CGXterra]

Hello,

I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but there's a lot going on. 🙂

I'm on my way across the country to Cali. I have a 36' Cedar Creek 5'er and I'm having an issue with my batteries. A bit of back story;

When I bought the camper, I had a pretty short and kind of not very helpful PDI. I didn't realize when we were doing it that ther was a single 12 volt battery in the battery compartment instead of the required four 6 volt batteries as the sticker in the compartment said. We're fulltimers and we towed the camper to our spot and deployed the jacks and slides, all fine with the single 12 volt battery. I noticed the sticker a couple of days later and called th dealer and told him and he ordered the batteries and came to my site to install them.

Flash forward about 3 weeks and we're getting ready for our trip. I went to try and put the slides in and the bedroom slide would reluctantly come in and then the hydraulic pump would audibly struggle and just start clicking when it came to putting the living room slide in. Dealership came out and put in a new hydraulic pump and it was doing th same thing. It was then that they realized that the four 6 volt batteries might have been wired wrong, rewired and all of a sudden the slides worked great.

Now 3 days into our trip after traveleing 6-8 hours a day and plugging in at a 50 amp service every night, the inverter starts giiving me error 1, 2 or 5 (it changees). Everything seemed to be working okay even with the alarm on the inverter. I decided too take the batteries out to clean one particularly corroded wire and check the water in all 4. Water looked good, wire brushed the corrosion and reconnected evreything. Now th slides won't go in again. 😞

We needed to get on the road this morning due to reservation commitments. I went to autozone and bought a 12 volt battery and disconnected all the 6 volts and now everything is working fine again. The battery got dragged down to about 11.4 volts during slide and jack operation, but was recharged to 12.6 volts during our trip today and is currently showing 13.6 while plugged into a 50 amp pole.

During testiing and troubleshooting I found that 2 of the 6 volt batteries were showing 5.4 and two were showing 6.3 after being hooked up to 50 amp all night. They're all less than 3 months old.

I'm hoping that the 12 volt fix will get us through the rest of our trip, but I thought I'd throw this to the experts on this forum to see if y'all might have any ideas as to what the problem might be.

Thank you iin advance.
Ed

***Sent using my iPad, please excuse the typos.

[SailingOn]

While we're waiting for some smart person here, a comment or two:
- If you're depending on the battery only for moving between sites with hookups, the single 12V or a pair of 6's should carry the load.
- 13.6V when hooked to shore power sounds like the converter is working.
- 5.4V on 6V batteries after an overnight charge may mean that pair are toast.
- The connections should look something like this for 4 6V's:

[2oldman]

Boy, what a saga.

First, it doesn't surprise me that an RV tech hooked up the 6v batts wrong. If all those batteries look about the same age (new), and all 4 were fully charged when installed, then it sounds like they're still hooked up wrong. Perhaps only 2 of them are in use, since not being charged overnight is a big clue for me. It may be you were given 2 completely dead batteries.

Can you check the wiring yourself? A voltmeter is a 'must' to do this. You may have reconnected them wrong too.

Why is there a lot of corrosion?