Casimir Posted December 7, 2014 Share Posted December 7, 2014 Bearing in mind the differences between a starter battery and a leisure battery, in an emergency, if I have a flat starter battery and a healthy fully charged leisure battery could I use the leisure battery to jump start the engine and would this cause any lasting damage to the leisure battery? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Joe90 Posted December 7, 2014 Share Posted December 7, 2014 Well I have, and I didn't lose any sleep over it. ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tracker Posted December 7, 2014 Share Posted December 7, 2014 No problem but you will need good quality jump leads and it may be as well to disconnect the leisure battery from everything else to avoid the risk of damage. If you have a solar panel disconnect it at the regulator input if you isolate the battery as some of them do not like being in a no load situation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hallii Posted December 7, 2014 Share Posted December 7, 2014 I would do it by connecting the two batteries and leaving them for a few minutes. The good battery will put enough charge into the flat one to allow a start. I would disconnect the two batteries before using the starter. Then my gel batteries cost £300 each! H Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lennyhb Posted December 7, 2014 Share Posted December 7, 2014 hallii - 2014-12-07 6:58 PM I would do it by connecting the two batteries and leaving them for a few minutes. The good battery will put enough charge into the flat one to allow a start. I would disconnect the two batteries before using the starter. Then my gel batteries cost £300 each! H Wouldn't want to shop where you shop, Exide Gel's as used in Hymer's are only £160 where I shop. (lol) I agree it is better to charge the engine battery from the leisure battery only start directly from leisure battery as a last resort and I certainly wouldn't do it with a Gel battery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StuartO Posted December 7, 2014 Share Posted December 7, 2014 hallii - 2014-12-07 6:58 PM I would do it by connecting the two batteries and leaving them for a few minutes. The good battery will put enough charge into the flat one to allow a start. I would disconnect the two batteries before using the starter. Then my gel batteries cost £300 each! H Starter batteries commonly fail because of a short within one of the cells, so no amount of recharging will allow them to deliver the very high current necessary to start the engine. If you are going to use your leisure battery(ies) to start your engine you will have to use jump starting leads - and very heavy duty ones too. The tyoe of leisure battery will make a big difference too. AGM batteries usually can be used as a starter battery, gel leisure batteries less certainly and proper deep-cycle batteries cannot, because they simply cannot deliver the 500-700 plus amps necessary to turn over a big MH diesel engine. If you have to do it, disconnect and remove your leisure battery and place it close enough to the engine battery to attach really heavy duty jump leads. Connect positive to positive and then negative to negative - then try to start the engine straight away. Once the engine has started it will continue to run and tickover, so you will be able to disconnect the jump leads and refit the leisure battery. Don't expect your engine battery to restart the engine again unless you know it was simply flattened (by draining inadvertently, rather than suddenly failing on you) in which case it will need recharging at least overnight. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brambles Posted December 9, 2014 Share Posted December 9, 2014 Oh ye of little faith. Gel Batteries are capable of about 3 or 4 times their max rated discharge current for around 5 seconds. For a typical Gel, say Exide G80 , with a max load of 400 Amps specified, you can draw 1500 amps for 5 seconds which should be more than enough to start the engine without damage to the battery.. Remember in most cases the weak starter battery will be supplying some current as well. No need to remove leisure battery if jump leads reach, after all being closer to engine battery makes no difference as you are not exactly going to start modifying your emergency jump leads. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gocro Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 My Stardream has a facility on the control panel that lets me do this, so I reckon it must be OK in an emergency. Oh, it came with gel batteries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lennyhb Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Brambles - 2014-12-09 10:57 PM Oh ye of little faith. Gel Batteries are capable of about 3 or 4 times their max rated discharge current for around 5 seconds. For a typical Gel, say Exide G80 , with a max load of 400 Amps specified, you can draw 1500 amps for 5 seconds which should be more than enough to start the engine without damage to the battery.. Remember in most cases the weak starter battery will be supplying some current as well. I stand corrected, I bow to and ask for forgiveness from our resident battery expert. (lol) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brambles Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 lennyhb - 2014-12-10 9:06 AM I stand corrected, I bow to and ask for forgiveness from our resident battery expert. (lol) Ahhh! but lenny, experts can be wrong sometimes. You are not wrong because some Gel batteries such as standby ones have much heavier plates and are not suitable for heavy loads. The other thing which is always hard to get around is in a range of batteries from one manufacture/supplier is you can check out say a 90 Ah battery, but then opt for 115Ah but it may be a completely different battery...this is more likely with rebranded batteries. The beauty with Gel is you do not need as high a specified capacity. Say you want 100ah flooded, That is 50Ah usable at 50% dod. Take a Gel which has 80% dod then you only require 62.5 Ah (65Ah) size for the same usable capacity.. .. or 75Ah Gel if taking flooded down to 60% dod. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lennyhb Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Brambles - 2014-12-10 10:05 AM The beauty with Gel is you do not need as high a specified capacity. Say you want 100ah flooded, That is 50Ah usable at 50% dod. Take a Gel which has 80% dod then you only require 62.5 Ah (65Ah) size for the same usable capacity.. .. or 75Ah Gel if taking flooded down to 60% dod. Never thought of it like that before, I was very pleased with the performance of the 2 x 80 A/H Exide Gels in my last van. Current van has 20 x 95 A/H Banner AGM, not sure how these will fair especially as they will never get a full charge from the Elektroblock. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brambles Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 lennyhb - 2014-12-10 10:57 AM Current van has 20 x 95 A/H Banner AGM, not sure how these will fair especially as they will never get a full charge from the Elektroblock. Good AGM's are not far behind Gel. You can discharge to 60 or 70% dod with occasionaly 80% for long life, where Gel generally 80% with occassional 100%. Watch your pay load with 20 batteries though!!!!! :-) You can also leave AGM's discharged before recharging a lot longer compared to flooded. Flooded is days, AGM say a week, and Gel a few weeks just for comparison. This means if you discharge over say 4 or 5 days wild camping in one spot before recharging then AGMs and Gels will have a longer life overall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lennyhb Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Due to payload I may ditch 18 batteries.(lol) (lol) (lol) I was more concerned about the way they are being charged. The recommended charge regime for AMG batteries is to take them up to 14.7 v then reduce to a maintenance voltage of 13.6 v. My Elektroblock is set to Gel ( as recommended by Schaudt and Banner) which takes them up to 14.3 v holds at that voltage for 8 hours & then a maintenance charge of 13.8 v, they never get fully charged and the float charge is slightly high. I also have the Schaudt LR1218 Solar Regulator which takes the batteries up to 14.2 v and holds at that voltage all the time there is enough solar energy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brambles Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Lenny, I am guessing what you have is the Banner 95201. This is a 92Ah . It has a charge voltage of 14.8 volts. Also as it is an automotive battery should be fine with 14.2 volts continuous from solar panels esecially as it is probably Pulse Width modulated. Charging at a lower 14.2 is not such a bad thing really as its not actually desirable to fully charge a battery to what is in reality an overcharge condition. You only gain a few percent by 'fully' charging a battery and the down side is you get greater erosion of the plates due to higher specific gravity ( strength) of the acid as a result. Higher charging also does create a little more gassing so electrolyte loss is higher as well. As it is designed for starting applications you will probably find you could actually set the regime to flooded if you wanted to increase the charge voltage, but the benefits do not really out way the disadvantages. The 14.2 volts for 8 hours is sort of equivalent to just going up to 14.7 and cutting back straight away. Downside is it takes longer for that final 5% charge to go in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derek Uzzell Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 I think the Banner battery now used by Hymer is the AGM 59201 (92Ah K20). When my Hobby’s Exide gel battery failed in France a couple of years ago replaced it with a Banner “Power Bull”-branded AGM 59201 obtained via a Citroen dealer near Caen. When I returned to the UK and looked at Banner’s website I noticed that that the AGM 59201 reference applied to a “Running Bull” battery (same physical dimensions, same Ah capacity) and that, while ‘my’ battery had a black casing, Running Bull batteries were (then) blue. I contacted Banner(UK) for advice and was told that case colour and branding could vary from country to country, but the battery I had fitted (I had emailed photos) was the same as a “Running Bull” one. I also asked about what charge regimen I should select on the Hobby’s battery-charger - gel or wet-acid - as Banner’s website said the former, but there was plenty of on-line advice saying the latter. I was told that either regimen would be OK. I also managed to contact the French wholesaler who had provided the Banner battery to the Citroen dealership and was told that it had been part of a small stock kept specifically for top-of-the-range VW Phaeton cars that had heavy electrical demands. At last October’s NEC Show I met a Banner(UK) representative at the RoadPro stand. I asked about charging an AGM Running Bull battery in a motorhome saying that I had chosen a gel charging regimen. His immediate response was “You won’t fully charge the battery using a gel regimen, as gel batteries are charged at lower voltages than wet-acid.” I said that this had indeed been my original understanding, but the advice on Banner’s website was that an IUOU charger set to ‘gel’ should be used for their AGM batteries. I added that my motorhome’s CBE-made IUOU charger definitely used higher voltages (and charged at those voltages for longer) on its gel setting than on its wet-acid setting. A C-TEK representative was called over and asked what voltage their chargers used for wet-acid battery charging. The C-TEK rep said “14.4V”. He was then asked what voltage was used for AGM batteries. The reply was “14.4V”. I then said that my leisure-battery charging usually came from the motorhome’s alternator that provided the same regimen as that delivered to the wet-acid starter-battery and, as the AGM battery was being adequately charged using a wet-acid regimen, that was good enough for me. The conversation then became much more technical, moving into B2B charging and vehicle alternator-based systems that used different charging regimens for starter- and leisure-batteries. When I left the RoadPro stand the Banner and C-TEK chaps were discussing charging voltages up in the 16s and how Banner’s technology was superior to Varta’s. The ‘right’ charging regimen for Banner AGM batteries had become academic for me as I had sold the Hobby and I knew our next motorthome would have a wet-acid leisure-battery (and my long-suffering wife had lost the will to live early in the conversation). Although my original question was never really resolved satisfactorily, I decided that I didn’t really care. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Joe90 Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 I'm with your wife...........well not literally. I very much doubt the average motorhome user knows or cares about such matters, certainly my five motorhoming near neighbours in our village would have no idea about any of this stuff, one recently asked me what a cambelt was when I mentioned in passing I'd just had mine changed 8-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lennyhb Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 Brambles - 2014-12-10 6:03 PM Lenny, I am guessing what you have is the Banner 95201. This is a 92Ah . It has a charge voltage of 14.8 volts. Also as it is an automotive battery should be fine with 14.2 volts continuous from solar panels esecially as it is probably Pulse Width modulated. Charging at a lower 14.2 is not such a bad thing really as its not actually desirable to fully charge a battery to what is in reality an overcharge condition. You only gain a few percent by 'fully' charging a battery and the down side is you get greater erosion of the plates due to higher specific gravity ( strength) of the acid as a result. Higher charging also does create a little more gassing so electrolyte loss is higher as well. As it is designed for starting applications you will probably find you could actually set the regime to flooded if you wanted to increase the charge voltage, but the benefits do not really out way the disadvantages. The 14.2 volts for 8 hours is sort of equivalent to just going up to 14.7 and cutting back straight away. Downside is it takes longer for that final 5% charge to go in. Thanks Jon, it was the constant 14.2v from the solar I was concerned about particularly in the summer when a a lot of solar energy available. The batteries are Banner 59501's and a automotive battery as they show a 850 A cranking rating. On the Elektroblock the difference between Gel & Wet is just the time it holds at 14.3 v, 1 hour for wet & 8 hours for Gel, a bit irrelevant really as I rarely into mains. In the 7 months I've had the van it has been connected to mains for 2 days and that was before I fitted the solar panels 6 months ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brambles Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 In my last post I meant 59201. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StuartO Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 I think most of want a "plug and play" solution, so if our MH has a built in charger/controller and a solar panel controller, we want a battery which will work effortllessly with it, including not having to top up the electrolyte. The absolutely perfect theoretical solution might therefore not be available, so we have to settle for the best of what is available. My nine year old MH has a Schaudt Electroblok 101 with a matching Schaudt solar panel controller and it came with two Exide G80 gel batteries, which still seem to be doing their job. We haven't lived in the MH, just used it for holidays and it lives in a garage hooked up to the mains when not in use. Leaving the Schaudt system to look after evrything has worked so far, even though I had the gel/non-gel setting selected wrongly for ages. Since we got the solar panel (130w) fitted we have managed easily for the few days at a time we spend off mains and I've occassionally discharged the leisure batteries to as low as 65% (on the Schaudt panel reading) when we have been off mains. I don't understand all the detail of what the Schaudt system does but it seems to deliver satisfactorily and my leisure batteries are still OK. But the leisure batteries cannot last much longer, so do I replace with two new G80s, costing around £200 each, or two Bosch S5s , costing less than half that? The Bosch S5s are said to cope well with discharges such as I require and they are also said to charge quicker than G80s, especially the last bit of a full charge. They should therefore perform better over the charge/discharge range which I use, compared with the Exides. I can't discharge below 10.5 volts anyway because the Schaudt system won't let me, so I'm limited to about 60% and a deeper discharge performance from the leisure batteries would be wasted on me. Bosch S5s have a five years replacement guarantee and I donlt think the Exides are any better than that, maybe not as good, even though in practice my original set have lasted much longer than the guarantee period. So I'm inclined to go for the Bosch S5s, or their Varta Silver equivalents, which are said to be identical and even cheaper, rather than replacing the Exide G80s like for like. I'm not bothered much about the cost saving at purchase because I suspect it would even out - the Bosch S5 being half price but probably last only half the number of years. Both the Bosch S5s and the Exide G80s are good batteries and will do the job. The deciding factor for me is the quicker full charge which the Bosch S5 achieves. Does that make sense Lenny and Brambles, or am I missing something? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lennyhb Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 For your use Stuart probably won't make a lot of odds which battery you go for, I think I would be inclined to go for the Bosch/Varta, however if you decide to stick with a Gel the Sonnenschein SL 75 is the same battery as the Exide G80 ( I believe they make them for Exide) and it's only £147. The fact that you can recharge the Bosch/Varta batteries quicker appeals to me as we never use hook ups and rely on solar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freegoo Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 Suart... The Bosch S5 and Varta Equivalents are starter batteries and will not last anywhere near as long as the Exide Gels batteries in a deep cycle application Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StuartO Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 freegoo - 2014-12-19 4:21 PM Suart... The Bosch S5 and Varta Equivalents are starter batteries and will not last anywhere near as long as the Exide Gels batteries in a deep cycle application I appreciate that they are sold primarily as starter batteries but as I understand it their new technology also makes then useful alternatives as leisure batteries with the advantage that they will recharge quicker than a gel battery, which will suit my pattern of use. I don't expect they will last as long as my current Exides but they are less than half the price and are guaranteed for five years, so in temrs of cost per annum, they might well be better value for money. That's the theory anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freegoo Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 As far as I know they are Starter Batteries only... hence the range of dual purpose and deep cycle batteries varta have which are clearly different specs. I don't think the warranty will mean anything when you use a starter battery in a deep cycle application as it is not designed for that. Its almost like taking a battery for a ford fiesta and putting it in a Mercedes S Class Diesel and saying.. it only lasted 12 months I want a replacement... (not quite the same.... but I think you know where I am coming from) I agree they will recharge faster than GEL batteries provided the charge rate used is adjusted to do this. But so will just about any AGM and wet lead acid battery that can take the higher voltage needed to recharge them faster Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rupert123 Posted December 19, 2014 Share Posted December 19, 2014 freegoo - 2014-12-19 4:21 PM Suart... The Bosch S5 and Varta Equivalents are starter batteries and will not last anywhere near as long as the Exide Gels batteries in a deep cycle application Who the hell cares, at half the price and five year warranty I do not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freegoo Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 Rupert, yes when you make the comparison with and exide GEL but you can get a proper fit for purpose Banner one for about £20 more... I struggle to see the logic in buying a Varta starter battery over a Banner semi traction for a motorhome to save £20 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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