hi first caravan weve owned so bear with me, got the van last year bailey moselle 2005, the battery didnt seem to hold charge so we bought a new 110 amp one, when i put it on the van it lasted about a month, its parked at home so i kept a check, we used it this year for first time and since we came home it has only lasted about five davs, there is a motor mover fitted which i use to put the van on the drive about 20 yds and i did charge it before i left it, i have plugged the lead in twice since and left it in for two days each time to charge, but it only lasts about 5 days with nothing turned on. cheers any ideas.
The van charger will never fully charge your battery imo.
Your mover will be drawing a lot of power from the battery and it needs to be replaced by a good charge which I don't think your van charger can do.
I would recommend a good stand alone battery charger or a smart charger which will trickle charge and monitor battery charge state.
------------- It is a wise man who has something to say.
It is a fool who has to say something.
A MM sucks a heck of a lot of juice on pick up and then goes down to 25 amps ish on use. The built in charger is a trickle charger and will top up your house battery over a day or so. You could always plug in a reg battery charger and see how many amps it draws, that will give you a good guide to the current % of power held by your battery. If it sucks in 5 + amps, its low, 1 maybe 2 trickle it.
I may be wrong here but a good/new battery should be OK
Whilst a mover takes a lot of amps it typically does not run enough to equate to much drain on a good battery.
Assuming it does average 25 Amps, and works on load for a total of ten minutes, that only drains a battery by 4.2 Ah; not a big chunk of a 110 Ah battery.
The big killer of caravan batteries is that many people don't recharge them promptly and then keep them charged. Also, don't drain out more than 50% of the energy.
Abuse then as above then they rapidly lose the ability to hold the quantity [Ah] of power they were sold at; the charger will see them as fully charged, but by then "fully" is but a fraction of what is on the label.
It sounds to me like the van is drawing power. As JTQU says, a small amount of motor mover use won't drain much.
Some fridges draw battery power unless the control is set to off as do some chargers.
Try charging the battery then disconnect it and see if it holds charge. When you disconnect the first terminal, there should be no spark, assumong you've switched the charger off. A small spark means the van is drawing power somewhere.
Quote: Originally posted by VangoMan02 on 19/3/2014
The van charger will never fully charge your battery imo.
Your mover will be drawing a lot of power from the battery and it needs to be replaced by a good charge which I don't think your van charger can do.
I would recommend a good stand alone battery charger or a smart charger which will trickle charge and monitor battery charge state.
I wholly agree with the comments here as I also read somewhere that the onboard battery charger will only charge about 85-90% of the battery's capacity and is advisable to charge the leisure battery independently via a proper smart charger before installing on the caravan. Once the battery is 100% fully charged and you are connecting up to an electric hook up on a campsite then the battery will hold it's full charge but if you charge initially via the onboard charger then a fully charged battery will never be achieved so the motor mover is consuming the available battery power you have which of course is not 100%. The advice is to do like 'VangoMan02' said and charge the battery via a smart charger first as this is what I do but then again I don't have a motor mover fitted so I turn up on site with a 100% fully charged battery.
When I was at work they bought a new small pickup and that had a problem of the battery keeping going flat in the end it was discovered that the radio had been wired incorrectly even though it was switched off it would run the battery flat in two days.
So I agree, charge the battery then disconnect it and see what happens if it goes flat you have a duff one if not some thing is using the juice even though it may not be switched on, One way of checking this would be to connect either a meter or a light bulb between one battery terminal and its disconnected lead with nothing turned on in the van you should not get a reading or the bulb light up, if you do then something is nicking you electric.
Another thing to check would be is to top of the battery dry? If wet from condensation a battery can gradually loose its charge slowly.
moppetsdad got it in one, i put a radio in it and used some wires that were already fitted it was draining the battery even when turned off. thanks again. and yes im feelin thick as a brick