RV Battery Maintenance Tips: Checking Fluid Levels

It's important to check the fluid level in your batteries to have proper maintenance and battery capacity. The batteries in this one are lead acid batteries and they're in this compartment right here. And we had these covers and this exhaust system up here. So as it charges and recharges, we're going to get some gassing. So that gas will come up through here. Exhaust through the vents that we saw on the front side of it. So these are a lot harder to check. Anytime your fluid level gets below the plates we're going to start losing capacity of this. So, we want to make sure we maintain that. What I'm going to do is just take these off, pop this off here and I'm going to take this. Just so we have some better access to this. There we go. Put that on the ground and I'll just snake this up here. Now I have better access to this and this is where my batteries are going to be. I guess I'll pull both of them off here. I'm going to check batteries on both sides. As you can see that's one of the challenges of checking the fluids on here. These are very difficult to get at. This one has two screws here so I'm going to take this off. Just have a better access. I could have checked the fluid level of these two batteries just by pulling this off. Not having to take the whole thing off, but I wanted to have better access in here to be able to see what we're doing. So the next thing I'm going to do, we've got two lead acid batteries. These are 12 volt batteries are going to be hooked parallel to each other. These caps in here, we're just going to pry that up a little bit. And since I'm working away, these are fairly clean batteries. I'm not right up in there. I'm not wearing safety glasses on this. You might want to wear safety glasses. If they're really corroded, you gotta be careful about popping these lids off. They may fling acid up in there but we can see we've got those three. Okay, so these lead acid batteries come with an acid when they're new. When we need to add anything to it we want to use distilled water. We don't want any kind of a tap water or well water because it might have minerals in it that will eat away at those plates, do some damage, short them out. So make sure you use distilled water. Now there's a couple of different ways we can see in here fairly well to test these or to check the batteries in them. However, I going to put those down there. If we're in a really tight spot, one of the things that I like to use just a little mirror like this and you can go in and just do a little test from there. I can see the battery acid level. That's good. That's good. Once, okay, good, good and good. If I do need to fill the acid level You can use a Turkey baster like this here. That's very common. Just put it inside distilled water and go in here. Now, one of the things you want to be careful about is that you don't overfill these and start getting some water on the outside or get any corrosion on the inside. If I have any type of sulfation out here or acid buildup, I don't want that getting inside. A really handy way of doing it is this battery fill. It's got a little check valve right here so I can fill this up with distilled water through the top, come in here and just pop it down in and it will shut off when I get to the proper level. So, take some time. You should do this two or three times a month. With the lead acid batteries, especially the the larger six volt batteries are going to take a heavier charge. They're going to gas more. You will have a tendency to lose more of the electrolyte inside of it. So it's very important to check your battery levels to get the optimum use out of your batteries.