6V battery issue
Hi hoping someone could shed a light on a battery issue we are having…
Pete and I travelled cross-country in our 2017 Escape 21 to Oakland CA to visit our kids & grandkids for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. We are renting a flat driveway( no hook ups) a few miles from them.
We’ve done this several times before at this time of year, staying without hook ups relying on just the 160 solar and our 2 6V batteries.
On our trips to visit them, we always were able to run the fridge on propane, and have enough power to keep lights on whenever we needed to, turn the water pump on and off, and charge our two iPhones, Apple watches, and an iPad or two without our batteries ever going down below 52% . On a sunny day, we would even have enough to run the heat for an hour or two if needed. (Or run the max fan for a few hours if was hot)
When we attended the Fiberglass rally in Quartzite in February, we had noticed that our batteries were not holding onto their charge as well as they had used to
so we replaced our original batteries with
Trojan T105 6V -225 AH deep ones
Our new batteries are NOT only not holding on to their charge, but are getting down to readings in the 40% -50% range with very little use by us.
We’ve been maintaining their water levels every month and just refilled it. We cleaned off the solar panels on the roof.
We checked for light switches, etc that could be unknowingly drawing something.
It’s been happening this past week, (the batteries getting charged up to 90% -but not holding it ) Here’s the stats from yesterday:
8 AM. woke up Wed NOV 29 45%
9:30 AM 47%
Nothing charging-nothing on
Noon. Sun is out and battery got up to 85%
We left trailer for afternoon out yesterday with nothing turned on inside or charging.
We came back to trailer at 3:00 pm and since we were playing games with friends, put on the ceiling light by dinette.
At 7:00 PM we checked our battery and it was down to 42%. We turned off the light finishing the game using a solar light and didn’t plug in our phones or watches overnight.
We woke up at 7AM today and it was 44%
It’s 10:32 AM right now and our readings show 76% 12.5v. 3.4 amps
What do you suggest?
Pete and I unfortunately are not real techy and have very little electrical and battery expertise and would appreciate any advice on how to solve this.
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