Testing a Converter on Your RV

The 12 volt deep cycle batteries in your RV are gonna run components like the lights, the vents, water pump and that type of stuff. This one happens to be one mounted to the front sometimes or in the step. Well, and you get a charge, recharging this battery by hooking up into 100 and 20 volt system. The converter inside your rig then which should provide a 13.6 volt charge when the batteries are, are low like at 10.5 or at 13.2 when it's in maintenance. So the way you can tell if your converter is actually charging your RV batteries is just a simple multi meter like this, put it to the DC setting. And since we're doing 12 volts, we can just do 20 on here and we're gonna hook connect to here into here and we see we are at 12.5. So this should be 12.6 fully charged and we did put a little charger on it beforehand, but we know we're not getting a charge out of that converter. So we're going to find out, is it the wiring? Is it that harness down here this little solenoid or do we have a bad converter? So let's go check. So our converter is back here in this distribution center and this is an all in one Magne tech. So it has the circuit breakers for all our 120 volt services which we see on our panel here. And it also has one for the converter. This is our 12 volt fuses that go out to our components and this down on the bottom is our converter. This is an old Magne Tech one and we had Steve an RVI, a certified technician come in. Um, you know, you don't want to start sticking probes down in the 120 volt. Basically, what you're doing is you're making sure that the, the uh circuit breakers are on. We don't have any blown fuses in here and from that point on, and we really need a technician to come in, but Steve went in and verified that we are not getting 12 volt power coming out of that converter to our battery. So we've got basically three options. You know, the first one is we can, we can put in a whole new distribution center and uh we've got one from progressive dynamics, but that means you're gonna take all the uh circuit breakers out and have to rewire those, you're gonna have to put in a new panel here. And uh so that, that's quite a bit of work that's not something the average RV, er, would do and that's not something that I personally would do. I would have a certified technician like Steve do that. The second thing we could do is we could put in a new converter. They have just a plug and play on the bottom side of that. And I would recommend going with a progressive dynamics, even though this is a magnet tech, uh, progressive dynamics has a digital version, a lot cleaner. And uh but again, you're wiring that I would have a certified technician do that as well. And the third option that we have is just to get a stand alone uh distribution center or converter, basically ba pretty much a battery charger. And you know what the thing that I look at is if you are not gonna be dry camping quite often, then plugging the unit in, you're providing 12 volt to various things and just charge that battery when you need it. When you're driving down the road, your tow vehicle is gonna provide it, charge to that, that battery. And you can verify that with that multi meter like we just did. So with this though, um I think what we're going to do with it $285 is the converter that will slide into the inside of it. So I think we're going to go with that route and we're going to have Steve put that in