Preventing camper issue
Hello, Currently have our camper in an outside storage facility. It's been three weeks in storage and will be using it in about a week. Since then I took the battery home and have it in a trickle c...
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Are you asking about doing damage to the battery? Or damage to the camper? Or damage to the solar charge controller?
Battery should be fine, if the 100 watt panel gets at least some good direct sun throughout the day then I would have left the battery installed because the 100 watt panel would be fulfilling its purpose. The presumably healthy battery would be getting topped off daily by the sun/solar. The controller would prevent overcharging the battery.
Camper should be fine.
Solar charge controller may not be happy though, the protocol is almost always connect the controller to the battery first to power it on and then connect solar input to the controller. When disconnected the protocol is reversed, disconnect solar input to controller and then disconnect controller from the battery. Right now it sounds like you have the solar input hooked up to the controller but no battery. I don't know that this means it gets immediately fried or what, but a charge controller is not meant to have solar input connected with no battery to direct the current to.
We weren't going to use the camper for more than a month until the next outing. It was recommended to detach the battery and trickle charge it until it's time to use the camper instead. I've noticed the controller flickering as well at the amp reader inside the camper and to the CO alarm reader. So should I turn all the breakers off? Then when it's time to camp again put the battery back in and turn all the breakers back on?
Thanks for the help
This is a good recommendation about detaching the battery in between uses. But you also have a 100 watt solar panel which can accomplish the same task without the hassle of removing the battery and putting a separate charger on it. This is assuming the camper is stored in such a way that the panel gets direct daily sunlight.
I'm not sure about advice in the flickering lights. Is this happening with the battery disconnected? "Breakers" in your OEM power center are for the 120 Volt AC system (shore power) and flipping them won't make any difference to an unplugged camper in storage.
