With a 3 battery bank, can you hook a battery charger conditioner to one battery in series and have it charge all 3?
Thanks, Mike
Yes
Well sort of, Three 12v batteries in a battery bank are connected in parallel. If you are going to connect a battery charger to the battery bank connect the + charge cable to the + post on the battery at one end of the three and the - charge cable to the - post on the battery at the other end of the three.
This is the preferred way to connect to batteries wired this way as are both the start and house batteries in your coach.
Interesting Roger...why is this the preferred way...?
Each battery has internal resistance. If you connect loads or chargers to the two terminals at one end of the three the discharge or charge to the second one one will be less than the first and much less to the third. Hooking loads or charging to opposite corners helps to balance (not perfectly) loads or charge.
Here are some reference documents on battery stuff. And a picture from BatteryTender.
Thanks for the info. That is what I will do.
Mike
Roger, if 1 battery in that group being charged in your diagram has a bad cell, would that protect the other batteries?
I had 6 of 8 8D batteries in my Newell go bad because 1 or more had a bad cell and caused all to overcharge. Don't remember the way it was wired but probably not that way.
I think when a cell goes bad there is lots of bad stuff that can happen. There must be a good way to discover them earlier than later.
I think the best way to connect your batteries is one battery at a time to a common bus bar with all equal length cables. The way they did it from the factory years ago was an OK solution for two or three battery banks. Loads are not equal nor will lifetimes be. When you go to four batteries in parallel it gets worse. In the coaches FT is building today all batteries hook up to a common bus bar. I did my two pairs of 6v (in series) that way