Battery and Solar woes

Gdetrailer wrote:

You need to consider "changing up" what you are doing.

You are working much harder than necessary by disconnecting, removing, moving, charging separate, then moving, reinstalling and rewiring them. It may have worked well for you for yrs, but there IS a better way that does not require all that work.

You do have a built in charger, although the one you listed is made by WFCO which is a multistage converter, it is somewhat less than ideal since there have been reports that it often does not go into bulk mode (14.4V) and gets hung in 13.6V mode. You reported the last two digits of the the model number which is 55.. That is the amperage the converter can supply.. Yep, you have a 55A CHARGER..

The trick is to see if the voltage at the battery terminals goes above 13.6V while on shore power, if it does then you are golden to let the converter do the work once you get home or while camping with a gen running.

The voltage is important, those small chargers you are using will not be able to provide 14.4V until the amps taper down significantly (like less than 1/2A).

One of the issues with WFCO converters is they monitor the battery voltage and the current being drawn and if the voltage is above a certain threshold and you have enough parasitic phantom current loads the bulk mode never gets tripped. This problem can often be resolved but that often requires removing all of the parasitic phantom loads plus upgrading the wire size from converter to the batteries..

Additionally with having solar feeding the batteries that may present more challenges to getting the WFCO to trigger bulk mode voltage.

You can save a lot of back breaking labor by considering more solar and perhaps replacing the WFCO converter with a Progressive Dynamics converter with Charge wizard.. PDs just work and is what I am using on my rig..

My batteries love the PD I have and thank me with 9+ yrs of service.. I abuse them pretty hard since the batteries must supply power 24/7 to my home fridge conversion.. I can run the fridge, furnace and some lights for 20hrs before recharging.. I have no solar at all.. If I added 300W of solar I could easily run off of the same batteries for a 3 day weekend and never have to run a generator.

I understand what you are saying and I appreciate your input, but there seems to be a misconception regarding my "setup".
At no time do I have the solar AND shore power working together...it's one or the other.
When dry-camping (or boondocking), we will use the solar panel to keep the batteries charged, or at least that's what we used to do before the gigantic battery upgrade. The stock batteries were installed by the dealer at the time of sale, so I imagine they weren't top-of-the-line types.
When dry camping, we don't use the inside shower...rarely use the furnace...only roll up the awning during high winds...basically, we turn on a light or two at night to find our way around. When getting ready for bed, we have battery-operated taplights at bedside. In other words, we put very little demand on our batteries, other than what the parasitic loads are. The fridge is a Dometic absorption-type, so it doesn't have a compressor.
When connected to shore power, the solar panel is stashed away and is not used...why would it?
Only when we are "full hook-up" do we run our AC or furnace...leave lights on indiscriminately, etc.
Might not be the way "most" people operate, but that's how we do it.

Furthermore, all of the disconnecting and removal was a one-time thing to verify if my batteries were salvageable...I don't do it every time.