Battery isolation switch

[Dueeast]

I have a single battery and it has an isolation switch inside near my breaker panel. How/when do I use it? Does it have an impact when having my fridge running off electric, then disconnecting electric and have the fridge automatically run on propane? Thanks. I just don't want the fridge to try to run on 12v dc

[BarneyS]

Just take the battery connection wire off of either the + or - side of the battery for storage. No parasitic drains possible that way.:)

After years of doing that, I finally put a battery switch on the outside of my battery box to eliminate the need to uncover and disconnect the wire from the battery.
Battery switch
Barney

[Lynnmor]

That "isolation" switch inside may not disconnect everything, check to see if the LP detector works with it turned off. You need to be sure the battery is completely disconnected when in storage if it is not connected to power.

[happy2rv]

The battery disconnect is used when you put your RV in storage. There are always "parasite" (some intentional, some not) that will drain the battery when its not hooked up to shore power. For instance, you should have a propane alarm and a carbon monoxide alarm. These will always be on if the battery is connected this is by design. Other things like the radio if its equipped, monitor panel, etc... can also drain small amounts of power.

If you are storing the RV without shore power, you definitely want to switch the battery off. Even if you have shore power available, you may want to switch the battery off and hook up a battery maintainer instead of keeping the entire RV powered up when its not being used. There are several reasons for this. First, the stock power converter / chargers tend to be poor battery maintainers and tend to over charge the batteries. Second, unless you flip the breakers off, when you hook up to shore power, everything is powered up. This means more wear and tear and chance for surges or lightning strikes hitting all of your appliances and TVs.

Dueeast wrote:
Does it have an impact when having my fridge running off electric, then disconnecting electric and have the fridge automatically run on propane? Thanks. I just don't want the fridge to try to run on 12v dc

This really isn't related to the refrigerator specifically. Depending on what type of refrigerator you have, it may or may not be able to run entirely on 12V. Given you referenced propane, I will assume you don't have a residential compressor type refrigerator. So, that leaves 2-Way or 3-Way RV refrigerators. A three way can run entirely off of 12V, but typically not very efficiently. The refrigerator will have a switch on it to select a specific mode of operation AC/propane/Auto for 2-Way or AC/DC/propane/Auto for 3-way. If you set it to Auto, it will run on propane when AC isn't available. As WayneAt63044 indicated, these types of refrigerators always need 12V for the control board to function. This is typically a small current draw compared to actually running the heating element on 12V. As Wayne also indicated, when you plug into shore power, the converter will provide 12V to power everything that operates at 12V and charge the battery.

[WayneAt63044]

The refer control board needs 12v to operate even if you are running it on AC. However, if your converter(battery charger)is operating you may be able to disconnect the battery. Try it and see.