OOPS! Dry house batteries

Maybe or maybe not, if your lucky you'll get another season. Just be ready to replace at any moment.
You 12 items should run when hooked to sure power as long as the converter can handle the load while trying to charge the batteries.

Its a gamble as to how long they have been out of water......you will know soon enough if they don't charge....watch that they dont get too hot trying to charge....

This is a good excuse to get AGMs. No water worries, no problems at all... with the possible exception of overcharging. I'd be looking at your converter to see if it's overcharging.

X2

2oldman wrote:
This is a good excuse to get AGMs. No water worries, no problems at all... with the possible exception of overcharging. I'd be looking at your converter to see if it's overcharging.

We have used jumper cables from the truck start battery here to aid the batteries to run the SLIDES in my pulled trailer setup... I just nose the truck up to the battery bank location and hook-in my jumper cables... Just be sure to get the cables polarity correct... With your Motorhome setup I think you already has a built-in relay contactor to do the same thing...

You most definitely have driven a few nails in the batteries letting them run dry on fluids.... When this happened to my 12VDC batteries connected in parallel I right away ended up with a shorted cell in one of the batteries trying to recover from it. One battery would not charge higher than 5VDC or so and got very hot... Game over for that particular battery...

After catching this I became very aware to the maintenance of the batteries and watched them very close on a weekly basis.

I have lucked out and got a few more years out of the remaining three batteries and just now are planning for their replacement. These were all installed in 2009...

Roy Ken

pianotuna wrote:
X2

2oldman wrote:
This is a good excuse to get AGMs. No water worries, no problems at all... with the possible exception of overcharging. I'd be looking at your converter to see if it's overcharging.

X3

I went to AGM for this very reason

If they truly were dry then I would say they are destroyed.

I did the same in my learning years. Filled and 2 days later 1 was leaking, big split along side of the battery. Replaced all 4 batteries. Now I check once a month faithfully.

Buy a good desulfator and let it work on them for a few months. I'm a believer in desulfators and have used them for 10 or more years.

Huh, 3rd time in 3 days I've had the opportunity to give this advice regarding batteries...

Add 2 oz of mineral oil (3-in-1 oil) to each battery cell, even if you have to turkey baster remove some water. This helps prevent water from being boiled out too quickly and reduces the corrosion present on the tops of most wet cell batteries.

If your converter is going bad though, make sure you get it fixed or replaced. Meanwhile, the oil will help get extra life from the batteries.

Mineral oil has been used for this purpose in wet cell batts for over 100 years now.