RV Lifestyle & Repair Editors

RV Battery Maintenance Techniques for Extending RV Battery Life

RV Lifestyle & Repair Editors
Duration:   10  mins

Description

RV batteries, which run the interior lights, refrigerator, computer, and any other electrical appliance you have installed, are built to last 5-7 years, ideally. Manufacturers recommend that you remove the batteries every month and have them conditioned by a professional. This conditioning breaks up the sulfur solids and other contaminants, churning the liquid inside the battery and making it last longer.

Whether through the difficulty of this process or forgetting to get it done, a majority of RV owners are finding their batteries only last two or three years. The Battery Minder is a new appliance you permanently install in your rig that does RV battery maintenance periodically without your having to remove the battery or even remember to have it done.

In this video, you’ll learn how to install the Battery Minder for automatic RV battery maintenance. You’ll find out safety rules about attaching and removing battery cables, tips on how to permanently attach the appliance to your basement wall, and ways to reach electrical outlets when there are none in sight. The manufacturer of the Battery Minder RV battery maintenance appliance claims you’ll get many more months out of your batteries when they use your product — sometimes as much as two or three years longer than your batteries might otherwise survive. With the cost of new RV battery sets, plus the annoyance factor from having to replace batteries earlier than planned, the Battery Minder is starting to look like a smart addition to your RV setup, and a great way to check one item off your maintenance list.

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The 12 volt batteries in your RV are important to run interior components like the lights and appliances. This unit here actually is a new set of batteries, and it's a very new unit, it's only about a year old. The original batteries did not last, they sulfated very fast and so they had to replace them. Now, battery manufacturers recommend that once a month you take the batteries and do a multi-stage charge which means a real high voltage charge on the front side that boils that led acid up inside. And it breaks up that sulfation or that sulfur inside.

So they don't cause sulfation, then it goes into an equalizing stage and a float charge. So that's not real easy to do. You either have to take this unit to a service center or take the batteries out once a month and have that done to properly condition these batteries. Now, batteries in RVs are supposed to last five to seven years. We're seeing that they're lasting typically two to three years.

So we've got a product here we've come across called the BatteryMINDer. And this BatteryMINDer will actually, we're gonna permanently mount that in here, connect it to the batteries and hook it up. It will send high-impact waves into that battery. It will never overcharge a battery and it's gonna help break up that sulfation and they're claiming that we're gonna get to over 200 cycles more out of this battery, which is a long time. So we're looking in this compartment right here.

It's fortunate because we have a lot of room to get into. I've got a good back wall here I can mount this to. We also have a place that we can run this right through the inside of it. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get this box outta here. And the vent tube out of the way.

Give myself a little bit of room to work with. And I'm gonna just snake that back up there. So now we've got really good access to our battery. We're gonna use our set of clips and one of the things, this ridge here gets really kind of hard to work on if I gotta crawl in there just take a little bit of pipe installation like this, slice the middle of it down here when you're working in some of these places with a hard edge on it. It's kind of nice then I don't have that edge up against my arm or my back when I'm crawling in a little later on.

So I'm gonna take these terminals off. We're gonna hardwire a set like this to them. So this is gonna be permanently mounted. Now, if I wanna do it temporarily, it does come with a set of alligator clips that I could just, every time I bring it home and put it into storage. In the garage, I could pop these on and hook it up and just plug it in outside.

But we're gonna permanently mount this one. Also, you wanna look in your compartment and see if you have a place to put this. Now, some compartments are so tight there's no place to put this anywhere around the batteries. So I would probably in that case permanently mount these, maybe run the cord outside. And when I get to the campground or I get to my garage I can just bring this out of a compartment and actually plug it in physically.

But like I say, we're gonna hardwire this one. So I don't have to think about it. It's nice because around the side here I can go back through this compartment, right up in the top here is some wiring already going through this wall back here and I can just take that silicone out of there and run my wires in and there's a plug-in on the other side. So every time I plug the unit in, I have power to this and I'm gonna condition my batteries automatically. I don't have to think about it.

So let's take the battery cables off. Always remember when you're taking battery cables off you wanna take the negative cable off first. You don't want any sparks coming from that positive side. You may have some fumes in here, and so forth. So we're gonna take this.

Gonna just set that down there. We'll tighten these down. Now, this is gonna actually condition both batteries because we are hooked parallel which means on a 12 volt system like this we are positive to positive and negative to negative. So this is creating one big battery bank. So by putting it just to one battery I'm actually gonna condition both of them.

Same thing with a six volt battery, you're gonna have two batteries, they're gonna be hooked in series. So you're gonna do positive to negative. And that creates one big 12 volt system off of two six volts, and it will condition both of those as well. So I am gonna actually run this wire. I do have enough cable coming off here.

I'm not gonna go straight back into here because I know that this is gonna be pulled out my 120 volt electrical cord. This happens to be a 50 amp service. So this is gonna come in and out quite a bit. So I don't want to run this in here and run the risk of that, pulling this off of here. So I'm just gonna run it around the edge and also notice this has an inline fuse too.

So if you ever get any kind of a short in the system this fuse will trip and that'll protect the BatteryMINDer from any kind of damage. So run it off to the backside here. And then we're gonna look at how we're gonna position this. And like I said before, we got a really nice clean spot, I can put this right here. I gotta make sure I have enough cord then to get around to that backside.

So I got a good six feet or more of cord. Put this in here. I got plenty of room. All right, so I'm gonna mount that first. Okay.

Now, I'm gonna take my lead here and run it around all my hydraulic stuff. That way this is all out of the way from my electrical cords or they're gonna get pulled out. Here's my plug-in. Gonna take these two. Make sure they're good and connected.

Pull this down. Inside there and that should hold it in place. Now we are going to feed this through. So now I'm gonna take this and feed it through. Notice up in the top, we have wires coming through.

This set with a conduit on the left-hand side actually goes into the compartment on the other side. And so we've got a plug in there. I'm gonna just take that silicone seal goop that's in there out and I'm gonna fish my cord right through that area there It's a little tight. But it will go through. There we go, now I'm gonna go to the other side.

We're gonna pull that cord completely through and plug it in. There it is. And I'm gonna pull more wire through here and then we'll keep that out of the way like that. Now that we've got our BatteryMINDer plugged into the outlet inside that compartment we've got electricity coming to this and it's starting to condition. The last thing we wanna do is check our settings, make sure we've got the right type of battery that's selected and so forth.

The first thing we look at, it is flooded cell batteries. We can do AGMs or gels. We're doing a two amp charge. So it's recognized that these batteries are pretty much topped off right now. It has been plugged in for quite some time.

So it doesn't have to do the four or the eight amp. It will periodically then recognize the condition of the batteries, adjust that and throw high-impact waves into that. So the last thing then on the side, we see the green light tells us that the power is on, the batteries are accepted. So they're in good condition and we're good to go. It'll be fun to see how much more battery power and battery life they get out of these over the period of time.

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