I'm a newbie or just stupid...

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
See posts with no answers
W

woodyacres17

Member
Joined
Jun 10, 2014
Posts
14
Location
Lower Michigan
This is my second trip with my TT.  We only went a few miles from home to a neighbors vacant land this time.  We camped over the weekend, with no electric so I used my generator.  Well, I brought the generator home on Sunday.  Went back last night to bring the "camp wagon" (as my 4 yr old calls it) home and found the battery dead.  We left the fridge running as we still had some food in there.  I thought, no biggie as I started loading it up.  Well, I had to hand crank the tongue jack as there was not enough power.  Then when it came to the slides, I didn't want to hand crank those, so I pulled my truck battery and jumped it.  Put my battery back in the truck and then went to pull away and realized the trailer wasn't plugged in.  I plugged it in and saw the lights on the trailer brighten up.  Then it dawned on me!!!  I should have had the truck plugged in and I would have had power to pull in the slides.  Doh!
 
shouldn't have killed the battery that fast..

altho I had this on my new FW as well.. hooked up the truck and then the slides would work.
haven't seen it since..
 
I bet you ran the fridge on 12V DC operation instead of propane. That would kill the batteries really fast. On propane I can run up to 2 weeks without a generator or a solar panel.

Yes I would of just gotten close to the hitch and plugged in being the truck must charge the trailer batteries for the function of the break away brake pin.
 
Well if the battery in the Trailer is a G-24 that is only 75 amp hours, or about 100 amp hours at the 1 amp rate.. 2 days of just the fridge would do it,  one day if you add in the propane detector epically if it is the kind that cust off gas flow when it alarms.  And this assumes an absorption cooling unit on propane.  Other things might be presenting load as well (Radio memory circuit) .

And as for plugging in... Might not have been able to feed power fast enough to pull in the slides that way, Jumping was best option.
 
Some of the converter/chargers supplied with travel trailers are not that great. Some that supply a constant voltage will not charge the battery that fast, so depending on how much you ran the generator, your battery  may not have been fully charged. The cheap converters also tend to boil the fluid out of the battery. Low fluid level will also affect the batteries performance.
 
Look into a GoPower 120V portable solar panel, I have mine wired into two Trojan T105 6V deep cycle golf cart batteries, I also have the original deep cycle 12V that came with the coach as a back-up. The solar panels are all you need to keep fully charged all the time if there is no access to another power source.
 
PS - your not stupid, we all learn everyday and this is a great forum to get educated from others, I'm only three years into this RV life and I read here almost daily, great people and great info!!!
 
A few days on a single battery is fine, but it looks like you went from the previous Friday night until Thursday, with 2-3 days of weekend use in between, so its not too surprising the battery went dead. It's probably a modest Group 24 marine type anyway - upgrading to a Group 27 size would give you 25-30% more capacity and probably would have been enough.

A mid-size solar panel, say 25-35 watts, would probably be enough to keep the battery topped up when not in use, assuming its in full sunlight. Even a tiny bit of shade typically stops all or nearly all solar panel output.
 
Thanks for all the comments.  I want to look into solar but since we just bought it, there is so much more we NEED first.  I wasn't surprised the battery was dead, I was just surprised that I forgot I needed battery to bring in the slid :eek:es! 

Live and learn, I will remember next time, though!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Members online

Total: 638 (members: 5, guests: 633)

Forum statistics

Threads
131,934
Posts
1,387,771
Members
137,684
Latest member
kstoybox
Back
Top Bottom