VSR Batt relay question
I have a northstar camper and I am changing out the vsr relay, I thought I had it connected correctly, but not so sure now. Camper is on the truck, and after running the truck for a short while ...
Forum Discussion
acudr wrote:
K Mac, The VSR - Voltage Sensing Relay is a small box like device hidden in your camper that allows the truck to charge your house (camper) battery when the truck is running and the voltage is above a certain level due to the running of the alternator, which is charging your truck batt. Somewhere above 13volts. Then when you turn your truck off, it is supposed to not let the house battery keep drawing from the truck while at rest. At rest, the truck batt should drop to 12.x below the voltage the VSR looks for to open. BEP is a brand name.
Apparently there are single and dual sensing VSR's. I believe mine (and probably most of ours) is a dual, which means if the house batter is charging, from being plugged in, the truck battery will charge also. My issue is I don't think this is a good idea as it seems, after charging, my house battery seems to stay at 13v for a while, so the VSR is letting energy leak out to the truck battery. My guess is and I am waiting and watching, is that when my house batt goes below the threshold, the VSR should shut off. I am certainly hoping this is the case as I am very miserly with the house batt and am not happy it's drawing.
The thing is, is that I don't think I would have ever known this is happening if I had not looked and wondered what this box was and why it's red light was on. Now that I know, this may have always been happening and I just didn't know it and thought the .3-4 amps was being drawn by the fridge or something else.
If this is the case, I will be looking for a single path VSR. However, these things are not easy to find and are typically dual sensing.
Hooking it up in the right direction matters too.
This is the single sense BEP model I installed under my hood. The dual sense is p/n 710-125A-DS.
I kind of wish I had the dual sense one because my truck sits for weeks/months with the camper on board, plugged in to shore power but the truck battery isn't getting topped off. I would think the residual charge would pull the voltage down below 12.8 soon enough without losing any significant capacity.
