Improving RV Battery Charge and Extending Battery Life
RV Lifestyle & Repair EditorsDescription
Despite what the forums might say about standard RV battery life being only two to three years, your on-board, deep cycle batteries should have the capability to last you between five and seven years. That is, if you take proper care of your battery and complete regular maintenance to combat invasive sulfation. There are a number of simple ways to extend the lifespan of your battery and get the most out of an RV battery charge for dry camping, and in this lesson we teach you a few expert tips for maintaining the deep cycle house batteries on your rig.
How to improve RV battery charge and maximize each battery
When it comes to things that shorten the lifespan of an RV battery, sulfurization is by far the biggest culprit. Sulfur builds up on a battery for multiple reasons, most notably improper charge and poor storage. By not maintaining at least minimal RV battery charge when the unit is in storage, sulfur attacks the lead plates of the battery and takes valuable years off its life. To help you get every bit of juice out of each battery, Dave Solberg teaches you some quick advice for increasing RV battery charge capacity and extending your battery’s life.
First, Dave explains why you should run routine maintenance on RV batteries once per month. If you have a battery system with a larger inverter, you can complete the multi-stage charge yourself, using high impact charges to break up sulfur and save crucial RV battery charge. If you’re like most RVers, you’ll probably need to take your rig to a repair center, where technicians will desulfurize and condition the battery for you.
Or, if you don’t have an inverter and you’d like to take care of your battery on your own, Dave introduces an inexpensive tool you can utilize to prolong an RV battery charge and extend the life of your battery by 200 cycles. Whichever route you choose to take, be sure to maintain your RV battery, you and your wallet will be glad you did!
The batteries in your RV commonly last about two to three years. They should last five to seven years. But the problem is, is we get sulfation, usually due to improper charging and storage. Now battery manufacturers, especially the lead acid batteries, recommend that once a month you take the batteries, and you run them through a multi-stage charge. What this does is the first stage is going to do a high impact charge.
It's going to break up that sulfur that forms on those led plates or the bags inside, and it helps condition that. Then it's going to go into an equalizing and a float stage. You know, most of us don't have the ability to do that. Now, if you have the larger vehicles with the inverters, the larger 2000 or higher inverters. they will do that conditioning in that battery.
For the rest of us, we're going to have to either take them to an RV dealership or to a parts facility that can charge those batteries. And that usually means taking them out once a month, that doesn't always happen. Therefore, we see those batteries start to sulfate and lose their life. Now, something that you can do to help prevent that is to first of all, make sure you properly store your batteries, get them up to condition. Don't let them freeze, put some type of a charge on them when you're not using it for more than 30 days at a time.
Another product you can use is what's called battery minder. And this is something you put on board in conjunction with your charging system and it will do high impact waves into that battery and break up that sulfur. They're claiming that they'll extend the life of your batteries by two to three years, or what they say is 200 cycles. That's an awfully long time. Now something else you can do, you can upgrade to the absorbed glass mat or AGM batteries here.
We don't have to worry about the fill level. There's very little maintenance in here. You still can use the battery minder on this and it will help condition that battery and keep it topped off and maximum. So by taking a little bit of time to properly charge these batteries, you'll be able to extend the life of the batteries, but you will also be able to have more battery capacity when you're dry camping.
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