Hi folks after having battery troubles and a dead battery (my fault) I want to keep an eye on the new battery but storage is half an hour away is there anything on the market so I could monitor the battery from home. Would appreciate any advice
Thanks Chris
the best way to protect the battery would be to make sure you have everything turned off and have a small solar panel to keep it charged. … but read on
if You have a battery monitoring system its really useful not just to have the voltage, but graphs so you can see the downward trend. Also automatic alerts to give you warning by text or email. some Graphing systems are better than others. This is one I got from phantom tracker while caravan was at a dealers. You can see the voltage decline. I was following this and had to tell the dealer there was a battery drain and to plug the caravan in. They did this a couple of times, but didn’t look for the source of the drain (Alde heating circulation pump). the phantom system didn’t use much battery power and a 20w solar panel kept everything going, as long as something wasn’t on (we had problems with the radio turning on)
the spikes are due to solar panel charging the battery, you can see the sudden rapid decline in battery voltage so you need alerts below a certain voltage. After the sudden drop it was plugged in for 7+ days, voltage was steady (no sun spikes). Then a slow steady decline.
the graph auto ranges so normally just shows the voltage from 14 to 10 volts, expanding the scale if needed. Really good.
this second graph from my current van, this was supplied with the van. Not very good. The pinch to zoom in should read “unpinch” or “stretch”. It doesnt show more detail. Why do the need a battery scale from 0 volts to 20?
Yes it’s really useful to measure voltage. My current van drains a constant 0.2 A. (According to the remote monitoring.)it’s has 80W solar and for a month it couldn’t supply enough power to keep eveything going. I had to go and plug it in to the mains and then turn off all power till the suns intensity was higher.