My Camper Battery Kept Dying, and I Found Out Why

What's up everybody? It's Simon from Leica and I've got a story about a battery a camper battery

a dead camper battery and then another dead camper battery after that you know what happened

I found out I have a bad power converter yep found out the hard way the money way by wasting a

perfectly good battery I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure I tried putting in on the trickle charger and it's dead dead and it's less than a year old

So I'm hoping to help you save a little bit of money. If you find that you have the same symptoms that I did, maybe you can find the answer quicker than I did and save some cash without burning through some batteries

So here's what happened. Once upon a time, we were out camping and the battery's dead

We just show up in the battery's dead. I'm thinking, okay, I should have had it on the trickle charger in the garage

I didn't. We went too long between camp trips. You know, it was like wintertime coming out of winter

Get back on the road. I didn't check it before we left. We get out there

It's dead. All right. That's fine. We've got hookups, but it's not charging

Okay, that's weird. And then the next trip, we're boondocky. And I didn't try to fix it

I didn't try to pay attention to it. I just said, oh, that's weird, but we don't need it. Until we did need it, right

Until we're boondocking. We're out dry camping. No power. Now we need the battery, right

Have you been down this road with me? You've been down this road before? I've done this before, too

I didn't learn from my mistake. So I didn't address the problem right away

And then we needed it. And then I was in real trouble. Okay

So what do I need? I need a new battery. Okay, so we go get a new battery

It lasts until it doesn't last anymore. Not recharging. What's the deal

What is going on? And I did not know enough about, you know, the whole electrical setup

this whole rat's nest down here of what's going on inside a camper

and why all this stuff is the way it is Of course what the power converter is doing is it converting from you know 120 volt to 12 volt to charge the battery and then 12 volt from the battery to 120 volt to power everything in the camper

Like, you know, the power outlets and everything like that. So there's like a charging component

and then there's an inverter component. And I'm still like way out of my league here

But I'm just trying to walk you through like kind of what's going on here a little bit. So still didn't know what the problem was

Dead batteries. I had replaced. Hope I can get you in on here right here

This little guy, propane alarm. We have a propane heater. So the propane alarm was going off

high-pitched squeal, worse than a fire alarm, smoke alarm. That's cheap and easy

That's like a couple wires, a couple screws, $15 part, $20 part, straight replacement

I mean, those things are universal, no big deal. So the alarm goes off

Next time we go camping. Another squeal. Plug in, what the heck is going on with the battery, charge the battery off the camper

Okay, the battery's charged again. set up camp, flip on the breakers, squeal

I just put that propane alarm in. Is it bad? Did I buy a bad one

Did I put it in wrong? What's going on? No. It was a slightly different high-pitched squeal

Turns out that my power converter went out like two weeks after my propane alarm went out

Just by coincidence, and they have almost the exact same sound. So if you have a high-pitched squeal and it's coming straight back to the power converter right here

Then it's bad it needs to be replaced So now we're a couple hundred dollars into this journey because a new unit just the unit is a hundred dollars

and RV techs if you're not familiar with the whole RV tech situation are they're all backed up like a month a month and a half

Don dare take it to dealership I mean you might as well just drop it off and go tent camp for a couple months and pick it up again So I start looking into DIY situations you know because I going to do it yourself

But this seems like a big job. Reached out to some folks on an RV Facebook group and got some really encouraging results

I actually got a couple of YouTube videos made by people in that group

Hey, I've done that job. It's not that complicated. Here's my video

Super useful. I'll put those down below. Shout out to those folks too

And it's basically, I haven't done it yet. I haven't done it yet

But it's basically on wire. Make sure you cold. Unplug everything. Unplugged battery

Even if it's got like a little trickle in it. doesn't matter you know unplug your snake and all that kind of stuff make sure you're

totally cold and start start taking it apart unplugging and label everything

really well take pictures of what's going on what the setup is right now and

just document it just document the heck out of it the new unit I got is

totally totally different but it was recommended by the website that I bought it from

as replacement for this unit right here, which is no longer in production

That's fun too. Isn't that? Isn't that fun? Because I couldn't just buy like another unit and just, that would be easy, right

That would be, that'd be easy. That'd be an easy DIY situation

But we can't do that. We can't do easy. We're fixing our campers

It can't be easy, right? So, totally new unit and it's like fancier too

You can't just buy like this, old school straight up you know it's got uh it's got you know all the all the guts all the good stuff

right and then a couple fuses and then couple breakers and that's it right uh so the new one has like

this smart battery charging thing it's going to be a lot healthier for a battery of this battery

uh if i can save this one it's probably going to last a long time if i have to buy a new one it's

going to last forever, you know, because of the, because the power converter is going to be

awesome once we get it in there So all that to say I haven done the job yet but I am sure enough that I finally found the problem

to my battery, dead battery situation in my camper, that I need to replace this

and I'm putting my money where in my mouth is. It was $170 for the unit

So that's how much I believe that I found the problem. And now it's time to get to work

Here's a fun thing about working on pop-up campers, right? Is you don't discover a problem until you're camping and then you got to go fix it

You can either fix it here while you're spiffy having fun. Like right now, it should be fishing

I'm not. Although it is a little windy. Or fix it when you get at home if you're doing it yourself

and when you have a pop-up camper you fix it by yourself at home you got to pop it up to fix it

and then you got to tear it all down that's like for i don't know about you for me that's about

an hour and a half right there i mean i haven't for fully setting up camp you know fully setting up

the camper and then tearing it down that is an hour and 45 minutes if i'm doing everything just

just so but if i'm if i'm just throwing it up you know i'm my driveway to work on it

that's still that's an hour and a half just to set it up and tear it down just for the privilege of being able to work on it so yeah that's used camper life that's that's some real life right there um you buy yourself a new one the stuff lasts i mean this is 13 years 13 years old this camper is and um you know the accessories are starting to go um the fridge yeah yeah we don't even use it you know i don't even trust it with my beer

So, it's, that's just used camper life. We got a screaming good deal on this thing

It's been great. We've got a ton of use out of it. And every now and then, you've got to roll up your sleeves

So if you've got some good stories about working on your electrical, I want to hear about it

Because, man, some people do some crazy stuff, and I love it

And other people have no idea what they're about to get into. and they get a little crazy too

That's a little more like me, and I want to hear those too. I'm Simon Blake up

We'll catch you next time