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[GMCnet] On battery monitors, alternators and batteries [message #298909]

Mon, 11 April 2016 22:20

glwgmc

Messages: 1014
Registered: June 2004

Karma: 10

Senior Member

A while back I put together a presentation for several of the GMC club events talking about how to “Live Large in your GMC”. That is available for free download from the GMCWS, GMC Cascaders, perhaps other sites, and my own web site, http://jerrywork.com on the GMC page. That presentation was all about how to add enough battery capacity to your GMC to meet most all of your needs, which kinds of batteries to use, battery chargers/converters and battery monitors. It may be helpful to some.

I learned through that experience and subsequent experiences with many different brands of converter/chargers, monitors, inverters, batteries, wire sizes/lengths etc. to be convinced that there are real differences not apparent by simply reading spec sheets. What I found was the things aimed at the boating crowd are generally better overall quality than things aimed at the RV crowd, but they are also more expensive. In the Royale, our long distance boogie monster coach, I evolved my selections to the upper end of the boating stuff for monitors, shunts, wire sizes and converter/chargers and to the industrial stuff for inverters and batteries. At the time, I found the larger 6vdc wet cell batteries provided the most cost effective and longest life but were also the heaviest. I had to do a bunch of rearranging of stuff in the Royale to accommodate four of them in the rear compartment where the propane tank is in GMC finished coaches without badly unbalancing the loads. The downside to that is maintenance and battery acid fumes. I learned to much prefer the AGM batteries even though they are 2x the price because I could put them anywhere - including inside living spaces -, and they require no maintenance. They also can be drawn down to 80% with the same charge cycle life of wet cell batteries being drawn down to 50%. That last remark seems to be controversial, but that is what engineers from the three largest AGM battery supplier insist is the case. Doing it again I would use two 8d AGM batteries from the high end companies even though they are more expensive than the four 6vdc wet cell batteries. I also in fairness must say that I have had no issue other than constant maintenance with the wet cell 6vdc batteries now after more than six or seven years of constant use.

For monitors, I found Vitron and Blue Sea to be my choice over Xantrax and Tri-Metric, but all four of these are better than no monitor at all, no matter what you are using for battery technology. The biggest delta between brands came when I started experimenting with different inverters. Boy, what a difference! The industrial units are way, way better in every way from my experience than the heavily advertised consumer brands and beyond comprehension better than the blue light special “modified sine wave” units featured on popular cheap tool sites.

The bottom line for me is that in our GMCs it is far better to do it right and pay for right once than to try to be guided largely by price on the false premise that “well I don’t use it enough to justify doing it right”. My POV anyway. Everyone needs to make that choice for themselves, but I think the correlation between how much you actually use your coach and how many times you have compromised “right” for “price” may be higher than you think. We drive our two GMCs at least 20,000 miles each year and love every minute of it.

I am now off my soap box and back to getting ready for a fun, catch as catch can summer of exploring the north land. Rant off……..

Jerry
Jerry Work
The Dovetail Joint
Fine furniture designed and hand crafted in the 1907 former Masonic Temple building in historic Kerby, OR

glwork@mac.com
http://jerrywork.com

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Jerry & Sharon Work
78 Royale
Kerby, OR