One Bad Battery Led To Too Much Aggravation

[garykd]

Hi All,

Back in November (Thanksgiving week) I chased my tail around and around for a few days. Hopefully, y'all can benefit from my experience.

1. The symptoms are:

1a. The coach batteries are not being charged while motoring down the road. The chassis batteries are charged when motoring down the road.

1b. The chassis batteries are not being charged when the coach is connected to shore power. Coach batteries are charged when connected to shore power.

2. Voltage readings at the BIRD and associated solenoid/relays were okay.

3. Removed all 4 coach batteries and took them to three (yes 3) different battery/auto parts stores to get them tested.

3a. The first place said all were okay.

3b. The second place said 2 of the batteries were dead.

3c. The 3rd place said they were all fully charged but could not be load tested.

4, I removed the two chassis batteries and took them to my local AC Delco battery place. One of the chassis batteries was bad. Even though it was fully charged the machine said it was bad during the load test.

I purchased two 12 VDC AC Delco batteries for the engine.

I installed them. I also reinstalled the coach batteries. With one chassis battery not coming up to full charge I can understand why the coach batteries were not being charge while motoring down the highway. The one chassis battery being bad may also explain why I felt the chassis batteries were not being charged when connected to shore power. Maybe the Iota charger just couldn't handle the bad battery + the other five batteries. Time will tell.

Some side thoughts:

1. The engine never delayed starting on the one battery. Every start was quick and never gave me an indication one battery had given up the ghost.

2. These batteries are very heavy! It would be interesting to know how much weight they add to the left rear axle, being that they are about 8' behind the rear axle.

As of the date of this post, the coach has been on one trip (for one week) and has been plugged in (as usual) 100% of the time. All the battery readings are back to normal. During the two days of travel, everything charged as advertised.

Hind sighting this problem, the only indication I had that a chassis battery was bad was the VDC reading on the chassis batteries was not the same as the coach batteries after being connected to shore power for a couple of days. With the BIRD, they should be the same.

[DeltaDonnie]

Your correct, sorry about the aggravation, believe me I've experienced this to. Buy your own load bank tester, mine is made by (Actron precision electronic solutions, model # CP7614) under a $100.00, good tool to have with your arsenal of testers.

My boat has a four bank charger, (3) of the batteries are connected in series to attain 36 volts, if one battery is bad the other two will try to equalize the bad one and eventually drain them. The charger normally go's into default on the bad battery, it's my first indication I have a bad battery that needs replacement or (in some cases it's just to low to charge by the four bank and needs a boost charge before the four bank will recognize for charging, usually 25% or more of battery charge capacity is needed). All batteries have a general life span, say 30 month's, if you have a battery fail close to the battery exspected life span it's always best to change all of them at the same time, otherwise eventually the other two will fail and cause the same problem.

Thanks for the post, opens my eyes to a bigger boat issue in the future. I have lots of batteries in our coach, being an all electric coach only difference is batteries are 12 volts connected in parralel.

[garykd]

Hi Don,

Thanks for the recommendation on the battery load tester. Am going to order one this next week.