Charging a "Thumper" battery pack

If there is no charger it can only equalize.

If the battery is 11.9 then it is flat!!!!

12.4 is a much healthier reading

Can you charge it while travelling to use the vehicle alternator?

Alan

Gazz,

As a rule of thumb, you should always keep your battery/ies fully charged all the time. I keep mine on a good quality charger (or solar panels) whenever I'm at home....which is most of the time unfortunately!!

I have 5 batteries in my truck (2 under the bonnet as standard + 3x 100a/h AGMs in the canopy), as well as 4x 100a/h in the caravan.

In my experience, batteries will last a LONG time if they are kept fully charged.

I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I knew that any of my batteries was down to anything less than 12.8 volts......it'd be like finger nails being drawn down a black board to me!!!

Generally, even when I've been on a long drive and all the batteries have been well served by my charging regime, I still find that the 25amp 3 stage charger in the truck and the 60 amp 7 stage charger in the c/van still start to work hard to bring the batteries back up to FULL. I see the voltmeters go rapidly up to about 14.2 volts and sit there for several days, before dropping back to 13.2v (which means they are in FLOAT mode).

You may actually be able to get your thumpa up to a certain level ABOVE the donor battery....by using a DC-DC charger.

Roachie