Dry Camping Advice

[dalej]

Gary, it sounds like you need to buy some new house batteries, don't you think? How long have you had them in that bus anyway? If they are over two months old, you should change them out. cash boy!

[Gary & Peggy Stevens]

Gary, it sounds like you need to buy some new house batteries, don't you think? How long have you had them in that bus anyway? If they are over two months old, you should change them out. cash boy!

Alright Dale I give up.... What do the house batteries have to do with the start batteries ??

And since they are all new, the only batteries I have left to change out are in the 6 cell flashlight in the drawer.... Dang it anyway this is such fun.

Gary S.

[MangoMike]

chgsetup.gif



Gary,

The Guest is a high tech 3 stage charger, so it won't cook the batteries when fully charged. It will go into a float charge mode.

The guest charger as shown should have 2 sets of wires to charge two 12v batteries at one time. Or one 24v set.

Simply take one pos and one neg from each set, cut and wire nut together.

Your 4 chassis (start) batteries will be interconnected with wires in some fashion to produce 24v. You need to find the final positive and the final negative (ground) of the set.

Take the Guest positive from one set and secure to the final positive on your battery set. Do the same with the negative. You can always put a meter on both sets on the battery to make sure you're dealing with 24v.

Good luck.

Mike

Note: From personal experience I can tell you that if a cell in a battery goes dead, sometimes the guest charger will not go to float and will continue trying to charge up that battery in the bank. With that you will notice a very strong sulfur smell in the bus barn, and you'll be forced to change the batteriesl

[dalej]

[QUOTE=Gary,Dang it anyway this is such fun.

Gary S.[/QUOTE]

Gary,

I was just messing with you since I knew you just changed out the chassis batteries.

I still feel bad that you did all that detail to our lincoln, you drove it so little!

[Ray Davis]

Gary,

Actually what you probably have is two sets of 12v batteries in parallel (still 12v), wired in series which gives 24v.

Truk posted a different wiring diagram vs. Mikes.

http://forum.prevostownersgroup.com/...4&postcount=55

The difference here is the Guest charge appears to have 2 12v charging circuits. Mikes is wired such that the charger is wired in series to create one single 24 circuit, and the charger leads are across the 24v and ground.

In Truks diagram, they are effectively using two 12v circuits, and attaching one each to the 12v parallel batteries.

I would assume that both modes are just fine.

Ray

[Jon Wehrenberg]

I don't think so. If the charger does not go through the Equalizer the diagram as shown will not allow batteries subjected to a parasitic 12V load to maintain a charge.

If they would maintain a charge then we would not need our equalizers. We could hook our 24 alternators up exactly as the charger circuit is shown.

The connections as shown are OK subject to some assumptions being correct. First, all batteries have an equal charge when the charger is activated, and second if there are any parasitic loads those loads are applied to each battery equally. Those are big assumptions.

I think Tom's approach is correct because he charges 2 12V sets equally.

[Jeff Bayley]

Regarding long term dry camping and generator use and keeping the batteries topped off and that, I but myself in gear to come up with an aux. generator sollution. I won't recount the entire discussion but you can search for post by me and it should be one of the last 3 or 4 post I made where I finally solved it (with some help from John while bicycling in the Florida mini ralley). My goal was to have a small aux generator for when all I wanted to do was keep my batteries topped off or use the webasco at night w/o having the batteries go below 12.2 volts or if I wanted to dry camp and just run one A/C. I also wanted a back up generator in case my main generator went down. I also didn't want to worry about fire at night since I had a close call with my generator before and I wanted the generator outside the bus at night so I could sleep more sound and not worry. Long story can be found as above by searching the prior threads, but the short of it is, I got a 2,600 watt quiet run Yamaha. It fits in the small bay on the passenger side of a 45' XL. After driving myself nuts drying to figure out how to hot wire into the main power panel, in the end, the easiest way to make it work was to plug it in right to the shore power cord. After it keep throwing the breaker on the small gen over and over I finally did enough trial and error and figured out to turn off one of the two inverters. Even if there is no load (ie, the charges are off on both inverters), it was still tripping it because the inverter itself (when on) was pulling some power. By turning the inverter off at the remote, it FINALLY worked ! In my case, the one inverter I left on worked the fridge and the rear air in the bedroom at night. Other's might have to move a breaker or two around to get what they want to work on the single inverter. If you were in good weather and didn't need heat or air, you could use something as small as a 600-800 watt genertator just to keep the batteries topped as an alternative to letting the auto start charge the batteries and cycle them. I've had rotten luck with battery life and it's probabley me and not the batteries but I can't get 12 hours of life from the batteries to run a few lights and the fridge unless their brand new. So just keeping them topped off with a tiny generator works for me even if I'm in good weather.

Some members think this is foolish and they just say run the main generator but in my case, I like having the back up and peace of mind of having the generator outside at night while I'm sleeping. I use a thick bike lock cable to lock it to the bus.