Dry camping battery charging

[cosmo]

Hello all, will be heading out for our annual 2 weeks dry camping with a new trailer this year, with 2 6 volt interstate batteries. On my old 23b hybrid, i used my 2000w yamaha to charge the 12 v battery with a portable charger. With the new camper having what i believe to be a better charger/converter, would I be better off hooking the generator to the camper via the shore power cable and use the on board charger, or go with a portable charger? thanks for any input, as electrical isn't my specialty.

[Mustang65]

Originally Posted by cosmo

Hello all, will be heading out for our annual 2 weeks dry camping with a new trailer this year, with 2 6 volt interstate batteries. On my old 23b hybrid, i used my 2000w yamaha to charge the 12 v battery with a portable charger. With the new camper having what i believe to be a better charger/converter, would I be better off hooking the generator to the camper via the shore power cable and use the on board charger, or go with a portable charger? thanks for any input, as electrical isn't my specialty.

Stick with the TT's charger. It is designed for your RV batteries and the TT's charger can put out around 30 amps whereas the generator will supply 10 or less amps. Do you have a Digital Volt meter so you can monitor your barberries so their voltage doe NOT drop below 12.VDC? Something like the one below.

Don

[Murff]

Cosmo stated he used a portable charger with the generator, not the generator's 12 volt charging. Most TT trailer charger/converters are to convert 120AC to 12 volt DC and recharging the batteries are a secondary function.

The portable charger, if a good one, can read the condition of the batteries and provide the needed charge rate.

Murff

[RoyBraddy]

We have a good smart mode 60AMP PD-9260C Converter/charger in our off-road Popup Camper...

I have been doing this long term camping for awhile and have figured out how our battery bank does in a one day/night run off the batteries with the things we want to run everyday...

usually we see the 12.0VDC point at 8AM when we first get up. This is when we connect the POPUP Trailer 30A shore power cable directly to the 2KW Honda Generator and let it bring up the battery bank to its 90% charge state in about three hours of generator run time...

Now we are good to go for the next day/night off the batteries...

We can 12-14 of these 50% to 90% charge cycles without doing harm to our batteries. After that many charge cycles we have to do a full 100% charge state which sometimes takes over 12 hours to complete so this is the our perfect time to head back for the house...

I do carry a 40AMP B&D VEC1093DBD portable smart mode charger to use from the generator but my PD9260C does a great job so always use it...

This all fits in great as most places we go to here around Northern Neck Virginia all seem to have some sort of Generator run restrictions in place. Most often can get a three hour generator run time starting at 8AM during breakfast...

I have never had any luck just running an hour here and hour there as it always gets dark on us around 10PM at running off the batteries doing this... When they hit the 12.0VDC point I pull the plug on them...

I'm sure others have their plan of attack but this is the one that works best for us and we do alot of camping off the power grid around here...

Roy Ken