Almost every caravan will have a minimum of one leisure battery. We believe it to power our habitation lights, pump, blown-air heating, and each other piece of electrical equipment when not connected to a hook-up bollard. Still, some people misunderstand the function and use of these vitals. A battery is just an energy store but, to store energy, you initially need to put it into the battery. The way how to charge a caravan battery offers two methods for charging the leisure battery: via the onboard mains charger when on hook-up and from the engine-driven alternator when on the road.
A contemporary caravan battery mains charger will almost certainly be a multistage unit that’s capable of charging the battery fully and maintaining this topped-up state. All you would like to try to do is keep the ’van on hook-up and therefore the charger switched on. The alternator, on the opposite hand, will probably not charge the leisure battery fully. The rationale is simple: it had been designed to recharge the battery under the bonnet quickly after starting the engine and to power the vehicle electrics while driving. Responsibility for recharging a second battery wasn’t a part of the first design specification.
However, the alternator ‘sees’ the discharged battery as a load and produces more current to accommodate it. Because the battery voltage increases, the present drops. This generally happens quite quickly when recharging the starter battery, which is why alternators don’t generally recharge leisure batteries alright. The opposite point about recharging leisure batteries is time. If you’ve got a 100 amp-hour (Ah) leisure battery and discharge it to 50%, then you would like to exchange 50Ah. If the alternator delivers 5A to the leisure battery, it’ll take 10 hours of driving to recharge it. Likewise, when using the mains charger, you would like to go away it on for long enough to recharge the battery.
Most on-board chargers are 15-20A units, so they’d finish the work in around three hours. Bigger batteries or multiple batteries will take longer (assuming an equivalent 50% discharge state). There are other ways to feature to your store of energy: solar and wind generators, fuel cells, and even LPG-fuelled, power generators. solar energy has become very fashionable in recent years, possibly prompted by the drive to introduce it for generating household energy. As a result, the worth of panels has plummeted.
One of the foremost commonly asked questions regarding solar is: “How big a panel do I need?” the solution has nothing to try to do with the dimensions of the leisure battery, but what proportion of 12V energy you employ. a little camper fitted with just a few LED lights will probably manage with a little panel of around 50-60 watts (W). However, someone with a 9m-long tandem-axle rig with blown-air heating, a 22in TV, and a compressor fridge, for instance, will need closer to 150-200W of solar land. The foremost common size of panel that fits is 80W.
Some electrical distribution units can take the solar feed and distribute it to leisure and engine batteries as needed. If you’re thinking of getting a solar dish fitted, check whether yours has this facility and ask the installers to wire it in accordingly. Remember that these systems often have a maximum solar wattage that they will handle, so make sure that the panel you select doesn’t exceed it.
Wind generators aren’t as popular, because they need to be taken down and stored for traveling. they will even be noisy. Engine-driven generators are often useful and sometimes have higher outputs than solar or wind, but they’re heavy, noisy, and smelly beasts. Fuel cells are convenient and may even be run on LPG, but are painfully expensive, mostly due to the rare and semi-rare materials wont to build them.
