A few reasons have led to this upgrade of the electrical charging systems.
When parked at home the van is up the side of the house, as such there is a very limited amount of sun hitting the solar panel, not enough to keep the twin leisure batteries in any state of decent charge.
In addition the vans engine battery suffers when not used for a couple of weeks.
We decided to fit a smart battery charger powered by a mains hook up, this charges the engine battery directly, which once up to voltage then trips through the Ring Battery to Battery Charger and then subsequently charges up the twin leisure batteries. If only we had an ideal world!
The Ring B2B charger has a combined Solar Panel input, for some reason the unit seemed to still struggle to keep any decent level of charge in the twin leisure batteries. The decision was made to split the pair of batteries into two singles which are connected together by a VSR when the voltage in the primary battery reaches a charged state. This seemed to improve the charging of the leisure batteries, but, however, there was still issues, the charge state of the leisure batteries seemed to be up one day and then down low a following day. After a few weeks investigating, I felt the problems were being caused by the Ring B2B charger unit.
Back to basics!
Remove the Ring B2B charge unit. Instead now fitting a VSR from the engine battery to the first leisure battery, which will click in when the engine battery is in a suitable state of charging. In addition, we fitted a stand alone Solar Charger.
So far, so good, all initial signs and charge state of the batteries all seem to be good and holding up as I would expect them to do.
As it happens this was the second Ring B2B charger we have used on this van, the first one blew a component and the manufacturer replaced it for us. However the second one seems to be suffering from a known firmware issue, it fails to switch back to solar when the engine battery drops down, once this happens the leisure batteries are not getting any charge. The cure for the is is a re-boot of the Ring B2B unit, but this only seems to last a few days at best before the solar charging fails again. Enough is enough, I will now be fighting to get some of our money back in trying to return the second faulty Ring B2B unit.
