Choosing the Best RV House Battery for Your Rig

Just about every seminar I do, I get the question they ask, what are the right batteries for me? And the right batteries for your RV are gonna depend on several things. First of all, how much stuff inside do you need to run especially on the LP, off the 12 volt side of it, the lights and so forth. What size of rig you have? How long you're going? And if you're gonna be doing boondocking, the more you boondock, the more you're gonna draw off these batteries. So let's talk about the different types of batteries. What might be best for your application? First of all, in this unit here, this happens to be a motor home. So we have the chassis battery on this side over here, and that's gonna be determined by Cold Cranking Amps. What size engine you have, the diesel's are gonna need much higher Cold Cranking Amps in it. These are house batteries. And they are deep-cycle batteries, very similar to what a golf cart would have or sometimes you see Marine/RV batteries. They are designed to be 12.6 volts and drawn down and then recharged with the converter on the inside. Now you would never do that with a Cold Cranking Amp. It's gonna stay charged all the time with the alternator. That's not gonna be drown down otherwise you're gonna ruin this battery. So on the house battery side, what you're going to look at is first of all, the amp draw, amp hours that are available in it and you can do some calculation of that. Basically, it goes to how much stuff you're gonna run and how long are you gonna run it before these need to be recharged? So deep cycle means cycling those batteries and the better battery you buy, the more cycles you would get out of it. Now there's two different types of deep cycle batteries. There's six volt and there's 12 volt. And basically they're gonna be the same eventually but this one here happens to be a 12 volt battery and you can tell by the six cells that are in it and it is deep cycle. The six volt battery which you see used a lot of times in golf carts are going to have three cells in these and you have to have two of those to hook what's called in series. So you're gonna hook positive to negative and that gives you a 12 volt bank with a positive lead here, and a negative lead here to go into your ground and your distribution center for your fuses. Now a lot of people kind of argue on the six volt versus the 12 volt. When I worked at Winnebago, we always used 12 volt batteries because they were more readily available out in the market if you needed to get new batteries. The six volt batteries typically will last longer more cycles. But again, you have to have two to get a 12 volt bank. Now some confusion in the market is that okay, I'll put two six volt batteries in and I'm gonna double my amp hours available and you're not. Batteries are rated by amp hours in groups. You have group 27 group, actually starts with group 24, group 27, group 31 and those all are determining how many amp hours you get. So you have to determine how much stuff am I gonna be drawing inside? Your lights are gonna draw from the 12 volt. The water heater is gonna draw the furnace even running on the LP. You're gonna have roof vents, variety of different things are gonna draw it. So there are formulas that you can look at to see how long am I going to go? How many things am I gonna use inside? And what would be the best amp draw. Now if you're not gonna do a lot of boondocking, you're not gonna draw much from these. You're gonna be plugged in, the converters can keep these charging back up. So you don't really need to go really high in the group series or the amp hours available. But the more you boondock and the longer you wanna stay out boondocking without having to find some way of recharging these whether it's solar panels or with a generator on boondocking, then you're gonna have to look at that. Now the 12 volt series, the nice part about these is I can fit two 12 volt batteries in here and I hook them up parallel, meaning positive to positive, negative to negative. That still gives me 12 volts just like that six volt system but it doubles my amp hours. And so then again, you're back to the argument, it's Ford versus Chevy. Sometimes the six volt will last longer in years, probably more often. One of the other reasons Winnebago decided not to go with the six volt is that as they were being recharged, there was a lot of gassing and so there was a lot of liquid drained out of this. And anytime you get the liquid inside here, the acid that starts to drain down or deplete lower than the plates, then all of a sudden you've taken the effectiveness out of that system and pretty much neutralized it. And from all the seminars I do, I ask the question, how many people here check the fluid level in their batteries every time they go out in the road? And it's barely a handful of people that do that. So it is important to check your batteries. The next thing we wanna look at is I get people that say, well, I'm just gonna use Absorbed Glass Mats AGMs, I'm gonna do a lot of dry camping. The thing is the Absorbed Glass Mat is a completely sealed system. It takes a lot less maintenance on these but you don't get any more amp hours when you buy the groups and they're a lot more expensive. So the big challenge with lead acid batteries is they need to be multi-stage charged at least once a month and we've hit on this on several of the videos out there. If you don't have a multi-stage charger, if you have just a typical converter, it's gonna drain to 10.5 volts, charge it up to 12.6, shut off, drains down, charges, drains down, that cycles. It does not break up the sulfation. As you drain the energy out of these and that's all it is, we're storing energy, we're storing power. As you drain that out, sulfur coats the plates in here and then it starts to get to the point where it can't store as much inside if you don't break up that sulfur. So you either need a multi-stage charger which would be like a 2000 watt inverter or there's some progressive dynamics as the charge wizard. And there's some that are coming out now that are doing that, just because of all the problems with batteries. They usually last two to three years. They should last five to seven years if we maintain them properly. That's why a lot of the solar panels now are coming with a multi-stage charger in their control unit so it lasts a lot longer. In several of the videos, you'll notice when we talk about an appliance that may work for about an hour, like the refrigerator and then it becomes insufficient cooling or the furnace becomes insufficient cooling. Starts good but then all of a sudden, after a certain amount of time, usually it's because those batteries are sulfated and they got charged, but they whoof, they lose their charge very, very fast. So you have to determine how much boondocking am I going to do? How much stuff I need to use inside this? And then look at the chart that's available on our website. And the other thing is how long you're going to go and how much you need. So the more boondocking, the higher the group, the more amp draw, probably two batteries. Now if I want to add extra amp hours to a six volt battery, I have to add two more batteries. So instead of two, I have four and I've got just about same draw as these two 12 volt batteries here. So how much space do I have? Now last thing I wanna talk about in batteries is you wanna make sure you get a good quality battery. There is a lot of cheap stuff out in the market especially when you go to these membership stores or home improvement stores. You see the Marine/RV battery for 8995 or a higher group one for $125. They are not gonna last. There's been a lot of research done. The plates are thinner, the welds are inferior. They just will not last very long and they're selling them. The only advantage, the only feature of that battery is the price. Make sure you look at something like Trojan batteries, Lifeline, if you're gonna go AGM. Winnebago's using Napa and Delco batteries. They've done a lot of research in their batteries and found that those are some of the best ones for the materials being used and also for availability for service if you do need to change them out. Now I do see a lot of people going with Interstate Batteries. The Interstate Battery on the car, the automobile and the truck market, I think are good batteries. I think they're okay for the Cold Cranking Amp ones. I have seen a lot of people putting the Interstate Batteries in on the house side of them and two or three years down the road, they need to replace the batteries. The good side about Interstate is they're all over the country. I personally like to look at something that is made for the RV industry like we talked about the Trojans and the Delcos and the Napas and it's a better battery. It's gonna last a lot longer.