Autotrail Arapaho Battery Charger

[Arapaho11]

Ok, brain picking time for those of you that know stuff about batteries and chargers.

We have a 2011 Autotrail Arapaho which we have owned for about 5 years. It has a Sargent EC480 with a 125w solar panel on the roof and 2 x 110Ah leisure batteries. We have the Sargent’s smart charger setting enabled to charge both the leisure and engine battery as it see’s fit.

Recently we found that our leisure batteries were going flat – even when plugged into EHU.

I assumed that the leisure batteries were shot, and they probably were because we didn’t know how old they were and they kept dropping to about 10v. Either way we replaced them and we now have a shiny pair of 95751 Banners and I was hoping that the problem was fixed…..

We are now living on the van, long story but its a temporary stop gap after we sold the house in a moment of madness, and we have found…. you guessed it…… our new leisure batteries go flat, even when plugged into EHU.

If its really sunny the leisure batteries stay charged, so I am relatively confident that the solar panel is doing its thing. It seems to generate between .02 – 6A on the display depending on the sun and we can see that it switches between the engine and leisure batteries on the sun logo on the Sargent’s display. If I run the engine for say ½ an hour or so or if we drive somewhere the leisure’s charge back up again so I’m sure that the alternator is also working perfectly – in fact I had this checked by the Greenflag man during a call out for an unrelated issue!

The engine battery is fine – it’s a new battery courtesy of the unrelated matter I mentioned above and for which I still kick myself! The vans seems to start no matter how long we leave it, plugged in or not.

Whilst I'm happy to be corrected, I'm pretty sure that our charger has stopped charging either because the fuse has blown or because the unit itself has given up the ghost. I see on the fuse board that the charger is labelled as Fuse 15….. but there are only 14 fuses.

My questions are as follows.

Could it be anything else?

Where is the fuse for the charger? …… and before you think “this guy is a numpty, its next to the charger” let me confirm your suspicions and add that I also can’t find the charger – any idea where it is as well????

Going forward, the van is a few years old now and I guess that the technology has moved forward. If I did get the charger relaced, what should I replace it with? Like for like or upgrade it, and if so - to what? I've got new batteries so I'm unlikely to upgrade to Lithium in the next few years but it would be a shame to replace the charger now only for a future owner to have to replace it again if there is little differance in the cost.

Having read loads of other posts I'm pretty confident that most of you guys and gals are considerably more intelligent than I am, so please bear that in mind if you are kind enough to share your wisdom!

 

[GeoffnDee]

According to the Sargent Electrical web site support section your Autotrail is fitted with a EC480 control and a EC500 PSU with a seperate PX300 charger and these are sometimes fitted under the PSU

 

[autorouter]

If you want to really know what is going on, it's time to stop guessing and take some measurements. Do you have a multimeter? Any old multimeter is good enough to start with, you can get one from any DIY store for about a tenner.

There's lots of YouTube stuff on how to use a meter. Basically, plug the black probe lead into the 'COM' terminal, the red lead into the terminal with 'V' in its label, and set the range to 20V DC. The symbol for DC is two lines, one solid, one dotted. The symbol for AC is a wavy line. Automotive electrics are DC, not AC.

Put the black probe on the battery negative terminal, and the red probe on the battery positive terminal. Push on them a bit to break through any oxide layer. You should get a voltage reading of between 10V and 15V. If you get the leads the wrong way round, nothing bad happens, but a minus sign appears in front of the voltage reading.

Now you're ready to take measurements. A battery not being charged will have a voltage of between about 12.0V (fairly flat) and 12.7V (full). If it's being charged by anything, the voltage will be about 13.0V to 14.5V. So you can tell immediately whether the battery is being charged or not. If you've got solar you have to take that into account, of course, so you could switch off the solar or wait until dark.

If the battery voltage doesn't rise above about 12.7V when the EHU is connected, then the charger is not charging.

According to the manual, the PX300 charger should apply a voltage that gradually rises to 14.4V, then stays at 14.4V until the battery is full. Then when full it switches to 13.6V, and the LED goes from red to green. For a fairly flat battery the charging can take several hours.

 

[Diabalo]

Is your EC500 in a cupboard behind the driver's seat if so you need to remove it to get the PX300. When the charger is on the green button light will be on. The fuse is 15 amp and on the EC500 so again you will need to unscrew the 4 screws and remove the unit to check it.

 

[Arapaho11]

To all those that have replied, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Yes my EC500 is in the cupboard behind the drivers seat, I will undo the screws and pop it out to see what’s behind it - no wonder I couldn’t find it I wasn’t expecting to have to unscrew things!!!!

Thanks for the tips re testing the batteries to see if they are getting charged. I will borrow a meter tomorrow, wait until dark, and see if I can fathom it out from your instructions. That’s great, thank you for spending the time to write that, amazing.

And well done to Geoffndee for identifying the parts used in my van – it looks as if worse case scenario it’s a £150.00 charger to fix it like for like.

Oddly though….. today the batteries look absolutely fine on the Sargent’s LCD display…..2 nights ago we were woken by low voltage alarms going off and the fridge shutting down, now they are at 12.7v…… it doesn’t make any sense!

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[Diabalo]

Arapaho11 I no longer use the smart charging facility as I found it gets it's knickers in a twist sometimes and it stops charging correctly. I have mine set to charging the hab batteries only for EHU and solar and I have a Vanbitz battery master from hab to cab batteries to keep the cab battery charged, this allows me to shut the EC500 down with the black button as that has a lothigh parasitic drain, when you do that the system automatically sends all the solar charge to the hab batteries, hence the Vanbitz battery master.

 

[Cush]

Arapaho11. It could be that the fridge is taking a massive chunk out of your batteries, especially at night when no solar input. Might be better using gas Overnight?

 

[Diabalo]

Fridge should only run on 12v when the engine is running.

 

[Cush]

“2 nights ago we were woken by low voltage alarms going off and the fridge shutting down,”
this made me think it was on 12v at night. Could it be an AES fault?

 

[Diabalo]

“2 nights ago we were woken by low voltage alarms going off and the fridge shutting down,”
this made me think it was on 12v at night. Could it be an AES fault?

If you were on mains it could have been a big dip in voltage, I had it once when a local sub station went down due to flooding and the grid went down to just over 200v so the fridge complained noisily and shut down.

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[Cush]

Arapaho11 is your fridge running on 12v at night, when you got the low voltage alarm?

 

[autorouter]

Fridge should only run on 12v when the engine is running.

That's true if you are talking about the 12V heater element that powers the fridge. However AES fridges also need a low current 12V supply for the fridge control board, gas solenoid, igniter etc. This low current supply usually comes from the leisure battery, and is on all the time. It's totally separate from the high current supply from the alternator/starter battery that comes on when the engine is running. If the voltage is too low, the low current supply packs up and the fridge switches off, even if it's set to gas.

 

[GeoffnDee]

An Autotrail with a AES fridge should not be able to cool on 12v , except when the engine is running , although the fridge controls/display will be powered 12v from the leisure battery whatever power source is being used to operate the fridge cooling

 

[Arapaho11]

HI Everyone

Just to clarify, the fridge was running on mains power when the issue occurred, as others have mentioned, despite this the gubbins of the fridge runs on 12v so when the batteries went flat it caused the alarm on the Sargent thing to beep constantly and for the fridge to flash a red light, beep constantly and shut down - We tried at the time to start it on gas but it wasn’t having any of it and at 2am neither was I!

I should have access to a multimeter tonight so will follow the ‘structions above to get an idea of what is going on. If there is no charge hitting the batteries I will replace the fuse, if that doesn’t work then I will replace the charger, if that doesn’t work then I will obviously need to replace the van!!!

On a slight side issue, its interesting that the fridge shouldn’t chill on 12v when the engine is switched off - I didn't know that. The above mentioned incident which resulted in a new engine battery was related to the fridge and 12v. After a 5 hour journey we arrived intentionally early to a remote site in Wales. Knowing we couldn’t get pitched until they opened we parked up and enjoyed lunch about 500 meters from the site entrance. Without a care in the world we watched the world go by for a while and enjoyed a cheese roll and a cup of tea. Then we tried to start the engine - but nothing…. The engine didn’t even turn over. Slightly gutted we spent the next 6 hours 500 mterrs from the site watching all sorts of vehicles arriving whilst we waited for recovery man to jump start us. He diagnosed the problem as being a knackered engine battery made worse by the fact that I had left the fridge on 12v to really flatten it. We were in the middle of nowhere, day 2 of a 2 week trip and he had a suitable battery in his van so it got fitted….. at great expense! This was about 6 months ago now and I am still getting moaned at by SHMBO so it is refreshing to know that it wasn’t actually my fault this time. I now have a NOCO jump pack on board as that was the most frustrating 6 hours of my life! In light of the above comments I am going to try to negotiate that all the moaning I received for this incident is rolled over to when I do something and it actually is my fault, which in fairness is quite often!!!!!!

Back to my leisure batteries - Some great advice here, thank you all so much - This is what the internet was invented for and an update will follow!.

Thanks.

 

[Arapaho11]

OK, quick update as promised…..

So the meter showed 2 things, firstly that the voltage readings on the Sargent display are correct and that secondly, as expected, the batteries were not receiving any sort of input from the charger.

The EC500 was pulled out and the fuses behind it all looked fine so it wasn’t them.

All the wires and plugs were given a little wobble and, just as all hope looked lost, the charger sprung back to life – made apparent by the fact that when it did the lights flickered, the battery volts shot up to 13.4v. Sadly however, shortly after refitting the EC500 and celebrating, the bloody thing had stopped working again and no amount of wire wobbling seemed to help.

This morning I’ve pulled it apart again and after wobbling the plugs didn’t work managed to get it going with a gentile tap on the top of the charger. Its clearly a lose connection somewhere but I wonder if it’s inside the charger unit itself. Oddly it goes off randomly when the van is stationary and we are not doing anything to aggravate a lose connection or dodgy plug – it doesn’t come on randomly.

Going forward, I have ordered a new charger which comes with all the wires and plugs so hopefully it will be a simple enough job to replace and it will cure it now matter where the fault lies - I am going to keep my fingers crosses that it isn't the EC500 that ats fault as that's a bit more money to replace!

Well done to those that identified both the location and model of the battery charger, you were spot on and I really appreciate the efforts that you guys went to in order to help me sort this.

Taking this as a positive - at least I know that the solar works and right now my batteries have had 5 hours charging straight on the ECU but as I write this, it won’t work for love nor money!

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