Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit59
Can you trust the icommand system on all new Keystones, they give you this battery voltage, even remotely on my smart phone app? Not really sure if battery cutoff has to be on for this to work. Ill have to test this out. Thanks. Also, what do you mean "flooded lead acid batteries"? Acid levels way over plates? Don't go Lithium? Not sure what you mean? And stick with stock converter that came with cougar 22rbs? Thanks...
|
Flooded, lead-acid is the name used for the types of batteries commonly used in cars, trucks, RV, etc. It just means it contains plates submerged in an acid solution.
One way to determine state of charge for a battery is using voltage, but it's not straight forward. The charts folks post shows SOC for a given voltage reading, but it assumes at-rest voltage (no load on the battery) and the battery has been sitting in that state for an hour or so. This is pretty difficult to do with a battery that is currently running your trailer. A shunt-based battery monitor, like the one mentioned previously, takes the guess work out of it.
As others have said, battery and other components needed really depend on what you plan to do. If you will always camp in locations which have 120v power available, then you can get by with the inexpensive marine/deep-cycle/combo batteries usually provided by the RV dealerships.
Having enough battery to run without 120v power can still be an advantage, however. On one of our trips, we stayed in an RV park which provided 120v power - which we needed to run our CPAP machines. After the first night, power was cut to the area (due to forest fire risk at that time) and we had no power. We had to cut our trip short and go home.
We have since converted our trailer to run solely on battery (when 120v is not available) such that we can watch TV, run our CPAPs and still get 2-3 days of use before we need to recharge. We plan to get a small generator to help with the charging should that happen again.