Battery charging

[dannx]

I am heading out dry camping with my 281dbs...I had a generator but was wondering if I should need to bring a battery charger or if running the generator and plugging the rig in is enough to charge them. They are dual 6 volts... I have always brought a charger with my old rig that seemed to eat up batteries but I’m not sure about the new trailer. What kind of amperage gets down to the batteries when the trailer is plugged into shore power? Thanks for the help

[ctbruce]

The converter in your camper will do a good job of charging your batteries. That is what it's designed to do.

[PARAPTOR]

X2 .......... Most converters are multi stage, ie the charge applied to the battery is a function of the condition of that battery, ie charging amps varies in the overall charging cycle. When using your on board converter, while charging the battery it is also supplying 12 VDC to your rig.

[Canonman]

This was one of my first questions a few years back. Above advice is spot on. Your generator = shore power. Your converter, likely a WFCO 89XX series, is rated to output between 13.2 and 14.4v DC (multi stage) depending on the discharge state of the batteries. I believe they provide up to 20 amps current to charge the batteries but with ours it's usually between 10 and 2.5 depending on the state of discharge.

[ChuckS]

Just let the converter do it’s job. It will provide in most cases voltage/current to bring batteries back to full charge. Since you are running GC2s carry a small hydrometer and measure specific gravity of those batteries while bound docking.

It will tell you much more about state of batteries. If you run RV furnace at night and not during day you are looking at about 6 hours run time on generator to charge the GC2s back to full state. Just a ball park estimate.

I run two GC2s and boondock in cold weather sometime and this is what Imusually see for charge times.

[JRTJH]

The WFCO 8955 converter/charger can provide "multi-stage charging" to maintain the batteries in your trailer. It can provide "all" unused amperage to the battery bank. Essentially you'll have about 55 amps of "DC power" produced by the converter. Roughly 20 amps of that will be used by the furnace motor, lights, refrigerator/water heater controls and that amperage will not be available to the charger section of the power center, leaving about 30-35 amps to be used in charging.

Keep in mind that the "charge stages" are controlled by the battery voltage sensing circuits in the WFCO. So, even if you have a 1 amp trickle charger connected to your battery, the 13.4 volts it produces will "trigger the WFCO" into the "float stage" and will prevent it from charging your trailer battery bank. It goes without saying that if the WFCO is charging at 20-30 amps and you "clip on a 6 amp accessory charger", the output of that "clip on charger" will turn off your main charging system because of the voltage being introduced into the battery circuit.

So, if you want to use an "accessory battery charger" there's no need to even plug in your trailer shore power as you'll be "defeating its capacity" with the extra input.

It's best to rely on the battery charging capability of the WFCO and in almost all situations, it'll charge your trailer battery system faster, more efficiently and to a higher level than the "shumacker 6/10 amp charger" that you bought from WalMart..... YMMV