Testing RV Battery for Charge & Condition
Dave SolbergDescription
The onboard battery has become an essential component of RV travel, powering everything from cooking appliances and camping gadgets to your entertainment for the evenings. That’s why it’s so important to keep track of how well your battery is running and give it proper maintenance between uses.
There are various tools that are essential for testing an RV battery for optimal performance, and each offers a different kind of insight into your battery’s status. In this lesson, we focus in on the charge of your battery, and walk you through a demonstration on testing your RV battery to see how much power it can offer and how long it’ll last.
Tips and tools for testing an RV battery
If you’ve owned and operated an RV for a while, chances are you’ve had to either test or change your onboard battery. Like anything electronic, your battery’s performance level drops over its lifespan, and you should know when to have it inspected, upgraded and replaced. To help you figure out whether your battery is still in good shape, Dave Solberg demonstrates step by step the process for testing your RV battery to find its maximum charge.
Dave shows you how to use a multimeter, battery load tester and hydrometer to measure important aspects of your battery, and then explains how you can determine whether your battery is okay to use or needs replacing based on what you find when testing the RV battery. You’ll learn how to check each of the battery’s cells to get a proper reading on its performance level.
When testing your RV battery, make sure you follow Dave’s advice to decide the appropriate course of action. If your battery’s charge levels are good but not great, it may be time to consider investing in a new unit that won’t give you any trouble. Use these expert tips for testing an RV battery, and we guarantee you’ll get the most out of your electronics!
There's a variety of different gauges and meters available to check not only the charge of your battery, but the condition and what load it'll handle. The first one is the multi-meter here and we put it on this setting. Drop it right on there and take our negative to our positive. And we see that it is at 12.13. So we have a pretty decent charge on this one but it doesn't tell us what condition the battery is in or what kind of a load it will take. So the next thing we wanna bring up is our battery load tester. Now this is going to go on to positive cable here and we'll pop this onto the negative side here. And it shows us our charge, which we knew was fairly good. It is a little bit to the low side but once we put it on here, it will take a load. And it shows that our battery condition is pretty good. Now the ultimate test Will be to pop off our tops here. I'm gonna bring this around like this. And you wanna be careful popping these off. You wanna make sure you don't fling this out especially if you've got any corrosion in here. We had acid in. And we're gonna take a hydrometer and this is just a temperature sensing hydrometer. And as we pull some fluid up in here we see that we need just enough to bring this up, get it to start to float. And because we are a little low on our charge, we do see that this is right in that red area here. If it was fully charged, it was a good cell. We'd see it down in the greens. So we're gonna take this battery and properly charge it and then let it set for two hours and we'll come back and test each one of those cells. So we've properly charged our battery. We let it set for two hours. Now we're gonna test it. The first thing we're gonna show is our state of charge. And we got positive right here. Forgot to turn on here. And there, and we see where at 12.68,69. So it's a fully charged battery, but here's the real test. We're gonna take this hydrometer and we're going to pull up as much as we need to get it to start to float. And even though it's a little than it was, we see that it's still not down in the green area. So this battery is not gonna last very long. Now this is only one cell. The nice part about this is you can test each individual cell. About the same thing. And same thing. So if we did have a battery that was in the good, we wanna test each one of these cells cause we could have one of them that shorted out. And then again, we're gonna have a very weak battery and eventually it's gonna not work for us at all. So even though it does say that we have the 12.68,69 what we had beforehand with the low cell test on here this battery is not gonna last very long. It's not gonna stay charged very long. So test your batteries, properly charge them. And they'll last a long time.
My new-used RV had two lithium house batteries. How would you evaluate the condition of those batteries?
If not covered in a more in-depth segment the the battery hydrometer will spot a shorted cell sometimes even before other test equipment. Test the electrolyte level in all cells and if 1 cell drops below the average level of the other cells there’s your short. Characteristics of a single shorted cell is a battery to low on charge to start a motor then when jumped immediately starts.
When do replace a 'dead' battery or attempt to charge it? If charge is the answer how? Drive or put a quick charge on it?
Use safety glasses when popping the caps off the battery !!!!
HAVE SIX 2018 6VOLT BATTERIES, ONE IS BAD. HOW MANY SHOULD I REPLACE? ALSO SHOULD THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME AMP HOUR RATING?
WHERE are your safety glasses and gloves????????????? AMAZED you would show people to do this around ACID with NO safety equipment. VERY UNSAFE AND DANGEROUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Have one chassis battery and two coach batteries (wet). Unit will likely sit under a carport all winter this year. Looking for recommendations regarding battery maintenance over a long period of zero to minimum use. Thank you for your help.