Battery died question

[whitebeach]

Hi all,

Had the hab battery die then put my car battery in to open the electric step, left it in over night and now that is dead as well! Can draining a battery to nothing then cause the battery not to be able to be charged again? I have a very good charger and it is not able to charge. What could be causing the death of two relatively new batteries?!

 

[peterc10]

The probable answer is that you have something electric that is drawing them.

 

[Reallyretired]

I'm terms of charging a completely flat battery a good charger is no good as it wont even attempt to charge it.. What you need is an old fashioned dumb charger which will charge a completely dead battery . The battery will probably be knackered anyway.

 

[GeoffnDee]

Is your fridge on and the leisure battery being used as as a 12v power supply to cause the rapid power loss from two batteries ?
If you connect a charged battery to the flat battery and then connect your charger to the one needing charging the charger should start to work , you can then disconnect the charged battery from the one being charged after a short time and hopefully the charger will continue to operate. (but , as suggested , the battery may be damaged through being fully discharged

 

[LostInSpace]

I'm terms of charging a completely flat battery a good charger is no good as it wont even attempt to charge it..

Alternatively, what you need is a really good charger with power supply mode:-

Sterling Pro Charge Ultra Battery Chargers | Force 4 Chandlery

Sterling Pro Charge Ultra Battery Chargers. Available to order now with Worldwide delivery. Sterling Pro Charge Ultra Battery Chargers - The latest in battery chargers with plenty of well thought out useful features. The units have 2 clear digital displa

www.force4.co.uk

^{_{Subscribers  do not see these advertisements}}

 

[Lenny HB]

Connect another battery in parallel for an hour then put it on a charger.
But if it's gone that low it's going to be knackered.

 

[whitebeach]

Connect another battery in parallel for an hour then put it on a charger.
But if it's gone that low it's going to be knackered.

So running a battery totally flat will kill it? I've done that often in a car (left lights on) and always been able to charge it back up.

 

[whitebeach]

Alternatively, what you need is a really good charger with power supply mode:-

Sterling Pro Charge Ultra Battery Chargers | Force 4 Chandlery

Sterling Pro Charge Ultra Battery Chargers. Available to order now with Worldwide delivery. Sterling Pro Charge Ultra Battery Chargers - The latest in battery chargers with plenty of well thought out useful features. The units have 2 clear digital displa

www.force4.co.uk

Is your fridge on and the leisure battery being used as as a 12v power supply to cause the rapid power loss from two batteries ?
If you connect a charged battery to the flat battery and then connect your charger to the one needing charging the charger should start to work , you can then disconnect the charged battery from the one being charged after a short time and hopefully the charger will continue to operate. (but , as suggested , the battery may be damaged through being fully discharged

No fridge off and everything else. I did notice on the panel the 12v light was on and couldn't be turned off (where one can turn off and on 12v). Also the water levels weren't registering at all.

 

[whitebeach]

The probable answer is that you have something electric that is drawing them.

How does one find what is drawing?

 

[whitebeach]

I'm terms of charging a completely flat battery a good charger is no good as it wont even attempt to charge it.. What you need is an old fashioned dumb charger which will charge a completely dead battery . The battery will probably be knackered anyway.

Ok, but are you saying that is the battery is completely drained it gets knackered? Why is that not the same for flattening a car battery when leaving the lights on and then be able to charge it up?

^{_{Subscribers  do not see these advertisements}}

 

[Jimbohorlicks]

You may be lucky that the battery will recharge and maintain some power but it will have been damaged and will not function to its full potential but there is no harm in trying .
You need to find what's causing your power drain.with a car battery thats charging everytime you run the car with a leisure battery it depends if you have solar .where it's parked up and how often you run the van or have it on hook up.

 

[Ernesto]

Ok, but are you saying that is the battery is completely drained it gets knackered? Why is that not the same for flattening a car battery when leaving the lights on and then be able to charge it up?

Starting a car takes a very large jolt of current. A flat battery that cant start a car might not be completely flat

 

[whitebeach]

You may be lucky that the battery will recharge and maintain some power but it will have been damaged and will not function to its full potential but there is no harm in trying .
You need to find what's causing your power drain.with a car battery thats charging everytime you run the car with a leisure battery it depends if you have solar .where it's parked up and how often you run the van or have it on hook up.

No I don't have solar. As I mentioned the 12v light is always on, on the panel, which means the 12v is on. Does this mean the switch in the panel is bad?

 

[pappajohn]

As said, the batteries are probably junk.
Try putting one dead one in parallel with another with some charge in it.
The charger will see what charge there is and start charging

 

[PlacidoD]

Hi all,

Had the hab battery die then put my car battery in to open the electric step, left it in over night and now that is dead as well! Can draining a battery to nothing then cause the battery not to be able to be charged again? I have a very good charger and it is not able to charge. What could be causing the death of two relatively new batteries?!

Having read the thread so far it looks like you have a parasitic drain. Ideally you are going to need a meter of some sort to check that out and it may be easier to get someone in to look at it. Provided you have a working leisure battery you could try removing 12V fuses one by one over a few days to note which circuit is causing the drain.

Do check that there isn't an obvious current drain. Do you have a heat element for the grey water tank that can get left on?

On the basis that the 12v panel will now not switch off demount that and give it a clean and waggle all the wire connectors and check out the movement of the 12 V switch.

I don't think that I would want to risk plumbing in a brand new battery until you have solved the problem. Maybe somebody has got an old one you can have until the problem is solved. You do not say where you are located. There must be a fair few of us that might help in that regard!

Final thought. Is your hab step fully retracted? I am just wondering if there is an open circuit there causing a battery drain?

^{_{Subscribers  do not see these advertisements}}

 

[meanders]

The drain could be anything from the switch or solenoid for the step motor not disengaging properly, the fridge, outside light, indeed anything could have gone faulty and be leaking power including insulation on wiring chewed through by mice casing a short or near short. The easist way to find out is with a good battery and a dc clamp meter. However, you can do it with a multimeter. disconnect the positive from the battery and connect the meter between the terminal and the cable. That will tell you accurately how much is being drawn from the battery. With nothing on, it should be very low and well under 0.5A. Then turn the panel on. it should increase slightly, if not, it might be your panel. Then turn on things like the fridge etc and watch it.

 

[Jabstatt]

Letting a modern lead acid battery go flat can damage it such that it is scrap.

I have used a Ctek charger to recondition batteries but it may not be worth the expense if you don't already own one.
Use a clamp meter, DC obviously, to search for the parasitic draw.

Tony

 

[Jev88]

Fiat (500 and Abarth) as an example have known drain faults on batteries.

Found by clamping neg of multimeter to neg of battery and touching each fuse under bonnet to see what is live with ignition off.
Radios are number one culprit. Found 6 circuits on Fiat still live. Two were alarm and immobiliser the others identified another fault that I could then deal with.

 

[Lenny HB]

So running a battery totally flat will kill it? I've done that often in a car (left lights on) and always been able to charge it back up.

I bet you have never checked the capacity of it afterwards, if you had you would have found it greatly reduced.

Our last Motorhome I had a flat battery once (due to faulty equipment). Battery was 4 years old or less I just replaced it, not worth the risk, I don't want to be stuck in France or Spain with a flat battery for the sake of a hundred quid.

 

[Jimbohorlicks]

No I don't have solar. As I mentioned the 12v light is always on, on the panel, which means the 12v is on. Does this mean the switch in the panel is bad?

Then you have no means of keeping a leisure battery charged up unless you are on hook up. If you have a light on a panel it will drain any leisure battery eventually.
Have you thought about buying a small solar panel that you can put in your windscreen to keep the leisure battery from draining whilst your van is parked up.

^{_{Subscribers  do not see these advertisements}}

 

[whitebeach]

Then you have no means of keeping a leisure battery charged up unless you are on hook up. If you have a light on a panel it will drain any leisure battery eventually.
Have you thought about buying a small solar panel that you can put in your windscreen to keep the leisure battery from draining whilst your van is parked up.

what do you mean 'light on a panel'. The 12v switch light was always on. The last van when I switched the 12v switch off the light went out. On this one the light stayed on. ALso the radio lights were on regardless of key off. I'm getting a solar panel installed soon. Just got this van and the first day the leisure was dead. But it was never registering any voltage on the panel even when I first got the van and the 12v lights were working.

 

[Figaro]

what do you mean 'light on a panel'. The 12v switch light was always on. The last van when I switched the 12v switch off the light went out. On this one the light stayed on. ALso the radio lights were on regardless of key off. I'm getting a solar panel installed soon. Just got this van and the first day the leisure was dead. But it was never registering any voltage on the panel even when I first got the van and the 12v lights were working.

Something not quite right there, the green 12v light should go out when 12v is turned off.
If your cab radio is lit up when switched off, that will drain the battery, probably the cab battery.
I had the same issue but fortunately it had a removable front plate which extinguished all the lights when removed.
Strangely it's recently stopped lighting up so I don't need to remove the front plate now, but I'm in the habit of doing it. Might be a setting on the menu but not something a conciously altered, it just happened

 

[autorouter]

How does one find what is drawing?

With electric circuits, it's possible to measure volts and amps. Volts is easier to measure. However if you are looking for small current flows, about an amp or less, the voltages may not look much different from when there is no current flowing at all.

That's why you need something that will directly measure amps current flow in a wire. There's two ways to do this. A standard multimeter can can be used if you know what you are doing and take great care. You need to disconnect the wire, and connect the disconnected ends to a multimeter so that the amps flows through the multimeter. There are other problems too - sometimes disconnecting disturbs the item you are testing, putting it into a different mode from its normal running mode. With all these difficulties, the multimeter method is not very useful or popular.

Another method of measuring amps flow is to use a clamp meter. The clamp simply clips around the wire, no disconnection needed, no disturbance to the operating mode. With a clamp meter, you can go round all your electrical items, easily measuring the current flow (amps) whenever you want.

There's one big catch if you decide you want to buy a clamp meter. Many meters only measure AC amps, not DC amps. House mains wiring is AC, automotive wiring and batteries are DC. So you need to double-check the specifications of the meter, to ensure that it can really measure DC Amps. You even see ads for an 'AC/DC Clamp Meter' which measures AC and DC Volts, but only AC Amps, not DC Amps. So read the small print carefully.

A popular clamp meter which many on here use, including me, is the UNI-T UT210E. It can measure up to 100A DC. But the best thing is it has a 2A range that allows it to measure small amps values. Very useful for tracing small drain currents. Also it has two sockets for red and black probe wires, and can be used for voltage measurements just like a multimeter. This is the one here:

Amazon.co.uk

 

[whitebeach]

Having read the thread so far it looks like you have a parasitic drain. Ideally you are going to need a meter of some sort to check that out and it may be easier to get someone in to look at it. Provided you have a working leisure battery you could try removing 12V fuses one by one over a few days to note which circuit is causing the drain.

Do check that there isn't an obvious current drain. Do you have a heat element for the grey water tank that can get left on?

On the basis that the 12v panel will now not switch off demount that and give it a clean and waggle all the wire connectors and check out the movement of the 12 V switch.

I don't think that I would want to risk plumbing in a brand new battery until you have solved the problem. Maybe somebody has got an old one you can have until the problem is solved. You do not say where you are located. There must be a fair few of us that might help in that regard!

Final thought. Is your hab step fully retracted? I am just wondering if there is an open circuit there causing a battery drain?

I've got the van over to Dickson's in Perth. They were booked to the timing belt before the electrical problem and have now said they doubt they have the time to look into the electrics! The van battery also went dead yesterday but was able to charge it, unlike the hab battery that was completely killed.

 

[whitebeach]

The drain could be anything from the switch or solenoid for the step motor not disengaging properly, the fridge, outside light, indeed anything could have gone faulty and be leaking power including insulation on wiring chewed through by mice casing a short or near short. The easist way to find out is with a good battery and a dc clamp meter. However, you can do it with a multimeter. disconnect the positive from the battery and connect the meter between the terminal and the cable. That will tell you accurately how much is being drawn from the battery. With nothing on, it should be very low and well under 0.5A. Then turn the panel on. it should increase slightly, if not, it might be your panel. Then turn on things like the fridge etc and watch it.

pity you're not in Scotland I would hire you!

^{_{Subscribers  do not see these advertisements}}

 

[Jo-jo]

I can't help with your electrics but you state

Just got this van and the first day the leisure was dead.

Do you have any form of warranty from the seller or was it a private sale? It's poor form from anyone, to sell it with a dead leisure battery.