Club 80-90 Forums

I am currently looking to replacing the bodge job of a leisure battery charging install with an itellegent split charge system and was wondering what every one else is using? Currently power usage is for radio small fridge and head unit, these are fed from a 115Ah leisure battery, as power demands grow a second battery may be added. Any advice will be much appreciated.

Thanks chris

Well happy with mine from Raw Components,very good instructions,not the cheapest though

Look in the WIKI. Its all in there.

I'm using a sterling battery to battery charger. It's costly but does a nice job of managing the batteries. The split charge relay I was using previously wasn't nearly as good and never really managed anything better than a trickle.

you can't blame a trickle on the relay, it's just a switch.

Does anyone use a alternator regulator like the sterling items?

Chris

Raw compenents as some one said. I got the intelligent split relay & it pretty good!

To clarify..

Any additional batteries connected traditionally through a split charge relay may well suffer an inbalanced charging regime due to the way the alternator 'SEES' the batteries.
The alternator treats the 'TWO or more' batteries as one big 6 cell battery, sensing their joint state of charge (because they are joined together in paralel) and the potential difference (PD) between overall battery voltage and the regulated output of the alternator.

What can occur is an inbalanced charge state between the batteries. This is especially true when using batteries of different capacities and state of initial charge.
Invariably the leisure battery capacity will be much higher than the starter battery but in the same vein it is the leisure battery that is much more likely to become discharged due to camping consumers.
Therefore the reality is that over time one or more of the batteries will end up with reduced performance capacity due to regular unbalanced charging.

As others have said....there are several devices that get around these issues by sensing the individual needs of each battery to charge them to their optimum level but these products can be expensive and not the easiest of upgrades to implement.

Another option and the one that I use, is to charge each battery individually 4 - 5 times a year, as well as the normal charging they recieve from the split charge setup.
It just means remembering to connect a smart car charger to each battery overnight a couple of days before a trip. Baring in mind that the batteries are not flat but there maybe some variation in their charge state.

Martin

Martin