Leisure Battery woes

[JimD1]

OK, so last weekend I thought that I had completely goosed our leisure battery.....On arriving on site, I relised that I had left the 12V system switched on when we dropped the caravan off at the storage site 2 weeks earlier. I had also left the water pump switched on... The meter on the caravan showed 9.5V, so before the battery died completely, we managed to get the fridge to light on gas - automatic ignition meant that I had to have some life in the battery to get it to light. Within 30 seconds of it lighting, all 12V systems just died - nothing in the battery at all.

We left everything switched off, & on the Saturday morning a friend suggested that we borrow his generator to see if we could get some juice back into the battery. After running the generator for 3 hours, still nothing. To keep us going over the weekend, I found a tyre place which had a 95AH leisure battery in stock, so I nipped off to get it. Thankfully, everything worked OK when we plugged it into the caravan.

On arriving home, I connected the old (when I say old, we have used it on 5 trips away with the caravan) battery to a good multi-stage smart charger. All I got on the LCD was "service or replace battery" & it refused to charge. As I had nothing to lose, I connected a very old low power battery charger, set it to 2A charge & left it for 24 hours. On reconnecting the smart charger, it seemed quite happy & charged the battery, saying it was fully charged after about 6 hours.

I now plan to discharge the battery by connecting a bulb across the terminals for several hours & recharge it, repeating this cycle several times. Tonight I'm going to buy a digital multimeter at B&Q to monitor the state of the battery during this process. I have 2 questions:

1. Do I just connect the multimeter across the terminals while I have the bulb on or do I connect the multimeter in series with the bulb?

2. What do you think my chances are of recovering the battery this way?

Cheers,

Jim

 

[boeingtech]

i too have recently completly drained my leisure battery.To cut a long story short my van charger failed without us knowing, we had already used quite a bit of battery using our motor mover and went out for the evening leaving our awning light on. We came back to darkness (we were left with no water pump or lights for the duration of our stay). I tried putting my battery onto my mates van for the day to recharge it for the evenings/water but could not get it to take a charge.

Anyways brought it home and put it on a normal battery charger and managed to get it to charge and its been fine ever since..

 

[JimD1]

Hi Gary,

Glad you managed to get your's charged. There might be hope for mine yet !!!!!

Jim

 

[Simon_5041576]

Put your newly acquired multimeter across the battery terminals this will then read battery voltage. If you put the multimeter in series with the bulb you will only be measuring the current through the bulb.

 

[JimD1]

Thanks Simon - will do.

Cheers,

Jim

 

[waffler]

If you put your meter across the terminals with nothing else connected you will get a higher reading than if the battery is on load due to internal resistance in the battery. In reality in modern vans there is a constant load due to alarms etc and so bet to test on load. if you use your bulb then make sure both bulb and meter are connected to battery terminals, ie. in parallel.

Your posh charger has a computer chip in it that will be programmed to not charge below a certain voltage.

 

[Vince_374407146]

Hi,

I too managed to completely discharge my leisure battery. Mine was reading less than 9V.

My battery charger also refused to charge it - but has a 'recondition' button. It took 48 hours, but eventually read 100% - that was nearly a year (and many trips, including use of a mover) ago and no problems at all.

Hope you are as lucky...