Lights dim, is it the battery? wiring?

Hi JJ

the first thing that i would check is that the 3 way fridge is not set on 12 v ? what you described is exactly how ours is until you turn the fridge over to either mains or gas?

We have a smart charger ( c-tek ) in our van and it can be plugged into mains all the time but we only do it about once a month to keep the battery topped up. We have also puchased replacement LEDs for the caravan lights and they are fantastic the leds just come with a number of different type fittings to fit the lights and you just replace the globe Easy as and the cost is about $6.00 per light to replace. LEDs purchased from deals extreme and come direct from HK

Pmacks

Batteries have relatively short lives and die...there is no way around that....any normal battery over 2 years old is living on borrowed time, and once past 5 years...if still doing the job its, a dead man walking.........ya might get better life out of some of the modern fancy technologies but that only pushed the inevitable back a little.

the give away is when you switch to the power from the tow vehicle, everything improves.

time for a new battery.


to get the best life there are 3 things that are important.

keep the battery cool...not so much of a problem in a van
Do not cycle too deep
Regularly charge the battery with a good quality charger

A good quality multistage charger will go a long way to keep ya battery healthy......a good one can be left connected and running indefinitely...but that can be more from convienience than necessity..as long as you charge ever fortnight to a month and never let the battery get flat you should be fine.

If the battery will not hold good chargel for less that 2 to 3 weeks and a fair charge for under a month it time to replace it.

cheers

Your local battery retailer might test the battery's performance for you, but if it is a few years old and won't pick up from a decent charge cycle a new one seems the go. Info on the web will tell you how to determine the age of the battery - some have coded stickers, some have a code stamped into the case and others have a letter and number stamped on the + - terminals. I just quit a calcium battery at 4 years - has been looked after but would not hold a useful charge any more. A multi stage smart charger is hard to beat as a general tool in the workshop - most new vans have them installed for the house battery - a portable one is great though for general workshop use. Conventional wisdom here and elsewhere seems to be ' keep your batteries fully charged all the time, to gain maximum service life' - this does not necessarily mean having the smart charger on permanently - but frequent charging at least seems the go. My van gets charged via the inbuilt mains charger a couple of times a week and gets maintained every sunny day via a small solar panel.

I have a 2004 Windsor Rapid for sale at the moment...YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT MINE...:-( LOL

When I initially purchased it, I found the interior lights to be dull as well. I just replaced the ceiling lights with newer type low wattage energy saver thingo's from a caravan store. Nice and bright now.

I also replaced the tail lights with some lovely LED's because the factory ones with the old globes were a little dull in the daylight. Not any more..

Enjoy the Rapid, they are good vans.

What happens with the lights re mains v battery varies from van to van.

in the old days we had two seperate systems, a 240v system and a 12 vlt system with a lamp from each in the various fittings.

One hopes that have given that one away by now.


if you have a 12 volt lighting system running off a battery and that battery is then hooked up to a manis charger.....argualbly the sensible way to do it these days.

the battery will remain in circuit whne the charger is connected to 240v.

this results in a couple of things.

If the battery is buggered and wont charge, the charger may not have enough schnaps to overcome that and bring the system voltage up.

how ever the car alternator and battery may have enough go to raise the syeten voltage......the buggered battery will still be trying to drag the system down though.

If you still have old style filament lamps....ya need to get rid of those and replace them with LED quick smart,s you will reduce your current drain a hell of a lot.

anyway, do al lthe other checks, like battery terminals and earths and stuff...because you should anyway.....but I recon your battery is "DEmsed, it, if it wasn't straped to its bracket it would be pushin up the dasies, berreft of life it rests, its singin with the chior invisibule....its bleedin snuffed it"

cheers

Try this disconnect the battery from the van if the lights are now bright on 240v then the battery was draining to much power from the charger ie not enough left for the 12v lights Have the battery checked probably has had it
If it does not improve on 240v no battery installed then check the wiring from the charger to the battery and outputs from the charger the charger may not be outputing correct voltage to run the lighting
good luck
steve

Also if your battery has a switch to turn it on,ensure the switch is ON when you are connected to 240V to charge. I assumed my batt was always in the loop and discovered after 12 months of having the van connected to 240V every few weeks that the battery was almost flat. No charge going into the batt as it wasn't in the power loop.

Hi all,

I might have missed a response along these lines and I'm far from an expert on caravan electrics, but is there ANY possibility that the charger itself has failed in some way?

Maybe the battery's not too flash, or even well on the way out, but if lights are brighter when connected to the tow vehicle, I'd reckon I'd be checking the on-board charger, too. At least I'd drop an ammeter between the charger output +ve and the battery +ve to see what's going on.

Regards,


Charlie

Hi we had a 2006 Rapid offroad for a few years and ours came from Windsor with a 240volt to 12 volt power supply that ran through the battery to supply 12v. The 12 volt power supply was a low quality single stage battery charger and was no where near as effective at keeping the batteries in good condition as a Ctek or Projecta multistage charger which we replaced it with. The downlights in the rangehood were easy to find LED's to replace, but I think it was the bed ends I had lots of trouble finding LED's to fit with replacement fittings from Whitworth marine for around $20 including LED globes being the end result. Windsor used a number of different interior lights in the Rapid range with many having the 5 watt halogen bulbs, don't know what the 2004 had?