Keeping the life in your battery

If you are an RV owner and live in the northern part of North America, you know that you need to remove your battery from your RV when you are shutting it down for the winter. If you didn’t know – well you know now…

Since we had the RV we usually brought the battery home and stored it in our basement. But during the past summer, my husband got some marvelous tips from a support employee for the genius chargers. We had chargers before but we never really got some “education” on how to deal with RV batteries and such during the winter time. So after we purchased a G7200 NOCO charger during the summer (after the previous two chargers failed us in a short period of time), my husband called to ask a question and got great information from the person on the other side of the line.

The G7200 is a fully automatic switch-mode battery charger and maintainer. It restores batteries to their original capacity, recovers slightly sulfated batteries, charges batteries in cold climates, rescues drained batteries, and provides maintenance charging to increase the battery life.

The last point above is the golden advice that my husband has gleaned while talking to the support person from Noco. He explained in detail why a battery could lose life if it is not charge regularly during storage time. As you may know already, you must not put a battery directly on the cement floor. Ours are placed on a table in our basement in order to switch the charger from one to the other easily. But after spending 20 minutes or so on the phone with the guy my husband learned that it is very important to charger the battery on a regular basis when it isn’t used in order to prolong its life.

The battery charger that we have now – the G7200 – is very well used in our home at this point in time. We are currently alternating the charging time between three batteries that we owned (including the one for the Zodiac boat for our electric motor). The tidbit of information that the support person has given to my husband definitively helps us to save our batteries from losing life on the long run. We had to replace a battery in the past and now we know why it didn’t last as long as expected.

So if you have stored your RV for the winter – take the time to charge the battery regularly during the winter months so that it can be fully used when the spring season returns. You don’t want to have any issue during a future trip with your RV.

Do you have some tips and tricks on how to care for your battery when you are not traveling?  Please do share it with me, we would like to know them.