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parsonsk

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Joined
Jul 2, 2012
Posts
18
I'm having issues getting power to my canopy lift for my tent trailer....even when the trailer is plugged into i had almost now power to the lift....looking at the batteries there was one pole that was really corroded...cleaned it off and now i have zero power to the lift....the rest of the trailer has power - lights, stereo, fan all good.
i check the fuse and it's ok

BUT what the heck is in the attached pics...sorry crappy pic but its the brown small box about an inch long and 3/4 high

it seems pretty rusty not sure if this could be the issue?????

could i have killed the batteries? I've drained them 100% a few times but they're only 1 1/2 years old


any advice would be greatly appreciated
thanks
Kevin








 

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The "thing" in your pic looks like a fuse and in that condition I would get it replaced. As far as the Battery, It may be near dead. I would pull it out and get a good charge on it then take it to auto zone and have them load test it. Running the battery down completely will kill it in short order.
 
ya it's not a fuse...that's what i thought too
not much inside when i opened it.



 
I'll bet if you by-pass it your lift will work. Then take it to a RV shop to match it up with a new one.
 
Those are two self resetting circuit breakers.  They're supposed to open when there's an overload that makes them heat up, then reset once they cool down.

The only reason for having two in parallel would be to handle more current than one by itself.  But with the corrosion on the terminals there's no way for the current to divide equally between them, so one will trip sooner than it should.

You can also get corrosion between a wire and a crimp-on foot that will block current flow.  It looks like there may be some peeking out the end of the black wire.  Dip the end in a solution of baking soda and water and see if the corrosion will dissolve.

If you're sure there's another fuse in the circuit, you could try bypassing them and see if your lift works.  If it does, I'd replace them with similar units located farther away from the corrosive battery fumes.
 
Thanks everyone....
i think you're right...partially. I now agree it's probably a self resetting breaker.

what about if the batteries are DEAD. i'm getting no power but when i plug in trailer the lights and everything seems to work...just not the lift.

 
The battery is dead. when you plug in the converter is feeding the lights, it will not make enough power for the lift.
 
I tried charging the 2 - 6V batteries in series, as 1 - 12V but the charger keeps going into error mode...not sure why. i've disconnected everything from the batterries as i thought that might be causing some issues but i get the same issue no matter how i do it.

I've switched over to charging the 1 - 6V and it seems to be working but over the past 16 hours it's managed to get to about 55% and it's holding steady.

Can draining the battery 100%, 3 - 4 times totally kill a battery???? They're only a year and a half old, talk about a $400 - $500 expensive lesson :(

any suggestions?

 
There is little question that totally draining a battery is going to cause damage but true deep cell golf cart batteries usually will recover to some useful level.


Car/marine batteries do not recover nearly as well, two or three complete discharges on a car battery will weaken it permanently.


Are you sure you have the charger set to 12v? The two 6v batteries batteries are one 12v if connected properly. (A jumper between a positive post on one battery to the negative post of the second with the charger cables going to the other positive and negative posts).
 
What is your charger max charge rate...10 amps?  A fully discharged 6 vdc deep cycle will take a long long time to recharge at that rate.  As for the charger erroring out with both batteries in series (12 vdc), fully discharged batteries will be almost like a direct short for the charger.  Depending upon the charger, it may kick off and on until the charge becomes enough to not trigger the output breaker or it may never recover without disconnecting.  Recharging individually might work, but it's possible the other battery is the excessive load culprit.
 
Well Well Well!
After 3 days of having one 6v battery charging at 6 amps i came home from work and the charger read 100% @ 6.5v

I've switched the charger over to the other battery and it read 5% so we'll see how long this takes...hope this works

i'll keep you all posted - thx


 
To answer the previous question, my charger has 3 options for amperage 2 / 6 / 10. i've been charging using the 6 amp setting
 
parsonsk said:
To answer the previous question, my charger has 3 options for amperage 2 / 6 / 10. i've been charging using the 6 amp setting
I don't know the rated capacity of your batteries and my math might not be correct, but consider this...if one battery is a 200 ah battery, it would take roughly 30-33 hours at 6 amps to charge a fully discharged battery and that's if the charger maintained 6 amps - which it won't because as the battery approaches a charge the current slows down.  Sounds like your 3 days might be about right.
 
If the batteries are very low, they likely will NOT accept the full output of the charger at first, Then as they "Warm up" to the idea of being charged, current will increase, then finally it tapers off again as they approach "Full".. so 3 days, not out of line for a six amp charger.
 

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