Charging help

Leave as is. How are you powering a charger?

1handyhubby wrote:
Shore power is gone.

What does that mean ? The 110v shore power is gone , the converter/charger is gone ? Charge the batteries together as 12v .

Sorry, haven't had my coffee. We're in a campground. Late yesterday we had the AC running for about 2 hours and I started to smell an electrical burning smell while we were sitting outside. I went in and shut the AC of and started to look around. My wife said she smelled it more by the table. I looked down and saw my volt meter at 0 so I ran outside and shut the breakers off. The cable was hot and then we saw smoke coming from the battery box. The female end that plugs into the camper melted and the receptical and wires in the camper burned. Batteries are good and all 12V works. Switched the water heater over to gas and once we aired out the camper we were ok. My plan is to get a battery charger and keep the batteries up so we can keep camping through Monday.

So it looks like the problem is with the AC wiring or the converter so your idea is a good one about the charger.

Leave everything connected and treat it as one large 12 V battery.
Connect the charger to the posts where the + and - cables leave the battery box.
Don't worry about the interconnect cable(s).

To answer the direct question, you can charge the two 6V batteries in series with a 12V charger safely. After all, the 6V batteries are just three 2V cells in series packaged in a single box.

If you go to redo the wiring, it is good practice to have a fuse as close as possible to the positive terminal of the batteries. This is to protect the wiring in case of a fault: the fuse blows before the wiring smokes. Blue Sea makes a fuse that connects directly to the battery terminal, you can't do better than that - but the holder and fuses are expensive (about $18 for the holder and $12 for the fuse). More common fuse holders can be mounted within 6" of the terminal.

Sounds like to me an inline fuse should have blown on you. I have a large FUSE BLOCK near the battery to protect wiring from burning up... Mine has a 130AMP ANL Fuse in it...

The Batteries can put out alot of DC Current if the cables get shorted to frame ground down the line. Smoking battery cables sure is the sign of a dead short to frame ground for sure...

My current battery install looks something like this


I am planning replacing my old 2008 batteries for two groups of two each GC2 6V batteries in my bank. My basic layout will look something like this when done..



Just curious if you have such a in-line fuse in your setup...

Roy Ken

This is a setup for powering up your two sides of the Power distribution panel.. The 120VAC is separated from the 12VDC... If your 120VAC cables were smoking then that has nothing to do with the battery cables...



You will need to determine what failed... Sounds like bad 120VAC connections to the pedestal but I am not sure understanding how this related to your battery cables smoking too...

maybe I am misreading things here hehe. I do that alot here lately...

Roy Ken

It wasn't the battery cables that were smoking it was the wires coming off the shore plug. It runs into the battery box then into the basement. I'm having a senior moment and can't remember how to post pictures from photo bucket. The pictures will explain it better than I can. The batteries, cables and all the 12V system seems to be uneffected. I was surprised the tv and DVD player work. I won't be running them because I don't want to drain the batteries.

The fuse size should be chosen based on the size of the wiring it is protecting. Some campers are built with pretty small primary wiring (like #8 or #10) and should have fairly small fuses (maybe 50A) to insure that the fuse blows before the current capacity of the wire is exceeded.

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