2 12 volt batterys or 2 6 volt
what gives me the most bang for my money. every other rig that I have bought always had 6 volt battery's but the new one has 2 12 volt. not sure what works better.
Forum Discussion
Hi Phil,
I never reject a chance to "opportunity" charge the battery bank. However, on a 566 amp-hour bank with say 200 amp-hours to replace, and a whimpy 10 amps from the alternator, getting to 100% is going to take a heck of a lot of hours.
If you have a small battery bank which is AGM or Li, a beefed up charging path, and drive for many hours per day I could see opportunity charging providing most of the energy. With regular flooded lead-acid the user will run into the 12.5 amp recharge limitation at about 85% state of charge. That slows things down dramatically.
I have beefed up the charging path and I do "see" up to 70 amps for brief periods of time. More normal is 25 to 30 amps. But that still leaves me with a long drive to charge to 100%
I never reject a chance to "opportunity" charge the battery bank. However, on a 566 amp-hour bank with say 200 amp-hours to replace, and a whimpy 10 amps from the alternator, getting to 100% is going to take a heck of a lot of hours.
If you have a small battery bank which is AGM or Li, a beefed up charging path, and drive for many hours per day I could see opportunity charging providing most of the energy. With regular flooded lead-acid the user will run into the 12.5 amp recharge limitation at about 85% state of charge. That slows things down dramatically.
I have beefed up the charging path and I do "see" up to 70 amps for brief periods of time. More normal is 25 to 30 amps. But that still leaves me with a long drive to charge to 100%
pnichols wrote:pianotuna wrote:
There are just two economical ways to do that.
Don ....
I've never worked out the $-math on this, but there may be a third economical way to bring RV batteries to full charge.
For us hit-and-run type RV campers who only stay a day or two or three at any given campsite, driving between campsites in a motorhome (as opposed to a towable) can fully charge the batteries via the main engine alternator if large enough AWG cabling runs between the alternator and the coach batteries.
Only 4-6 hours of driving brings our 230 amp hour AGM battery bank back to full. At least the built-in ammeter shows zero amps going into the batteries after this amount of driving. I assume that if the batteries will no longer accept any current from the alternator, that this means they are fully charged. Is this a bad assumption?
Our situation was like this with our previous AGM batteries for years and it's turning out to be the same regarding our new set of AGM batteries. This way of fully charging our RV batteries may not be "economical" but it certainly is "not-noticeable" dollar-wise ... since we would be driving between the campsites anyway.
