[bestgenman]

Hi all, something new!! Entered the coach experiencing the odor similar to hot oil. Investigated below and found one of the house batteries with elevated temperature (around 120F). Disconnected the affected battery from the string. I suspect thermal runaway as the battery is surely dry inside from the odor.
Question is, has anyone experienced an incident such as this?

Gordon

[encantotom]

steve magowan had some batteries expand and go bad, steve, can you elaborate what happened?

tom

[smagown]

Yes. My starting batteries were weak. My coach batteries had the temp sensor from the Outback attached to one of them. I merged the two banks without putting my load tester on the starting batteries. Bad mistake. I left them merged for two weeks thinking the temp sensor would shut the Outback charger off but all six were swollen and leaking and the tops had distorted, a huge mess. Replaced all six plus the two starting batteries. I now only merge to start. Very expensive $3100 lesson for the 6 Lifeline AGMs.
Thanks,

[bikestuff]

Ok, now I am really confused. I have had lots of battery troubles with my coach...and have replaced multiple sets of engine batteries until the Newell guys found the problem->several bad/corroded connections in the engine bay.

I have been told conflicting information about the merge switch. 1) Leave on all the time, 2) Turn on to crank, 3) Leave off unless you have dead battery, 4) Turn it on for "a while" to equalize voltages between the house and the engine batteries.

Steve, I also have an outback inverter...can you verify that it is setup for the proper kind of batteries. Mine was setup as AGM, but my engine batteries where NOT AGM, so when I merged the two....well I may have done the same thing to at least one set.

I cant believe that merging the batteries (even with bad engine batteries) would "cook" your house batteries.
Can anyone step in here and tell us...1) When is the proper time to use the Merge switch 2) For AGM batteries, how do you monitor the health of the batteries 3) With the merge switch present in our coaches, is it ever wise / proper to have AGM AND non AGM batteries on the same coach?

[smagown]

Bill:
I think my problem was the starting batteries were getting weak and wouldn't charge. I should have load tested them after attempting to charge them and I would have found they were going south. I also shouldn't have tried to charge two banks with very different voltage levels. The starting batteries were wet cell. The Outback is set up for AGM. What I never understood was why my Outback didn't stop charging when the coach batteries overheated. I thought the temp sensor would have sent an overheat signal to the Outback. I sent the inverter and temp sensor to Outback but they could not find anything wrong. I have had no further problems since I don't merge unless the starting batteries are low.

[truk4u]

Steve,

Sounds like like your chassis batteries had dead cell(s) and the inverters just continued charging because they could never get to the float voltage. You can use the wet cell charging parameters with Lifeline AGM's the numbers are close enough. Some inverters don't have an AGM setting, that seems to come up all the time.

[bikestuff]

Tom,

Not to beat a dead horse...but...

So if you have AGM house batteries and wet cell engine batteries, then you should set your inverter for wet? (That was my situation before I finally replaced all batteries with AGM).

As for the switch. If Steve had not merged the battery strings, then his outback would have stopped charging as expected. That leaves the question...is it ok to leave your merge switch in the "ON" position?

Cheers,
bill

[bestgenman]

Bill, Here is my charger/battery 101 (the one I use) and yours may be different. Wet cell, gel, & AGM all have different voltage levels, i.e. lifeline AGM are generally charged to 14.2V. Wet cells @ 13.2 +-.

Newell seems to use wet cell 8D's for engine and AGM's for house (or at least on many of the late models like ours). that means there are two different charging levels and paralleling (even if your charger has two different settings as in the case of the Heart charger/invertor) will let the higher voltage be applied on the wet & AGM. And since the AGM is a higher level, so are the wets being charged at this level. Paralleling, in my opinion, is not a good thing except for starting.

You might want to read your Outback manual for the instructions on how to check your settings. First you must know what your batteries require (both house and engine). You would think they would have been set correctly while at Newell!

[Gordon]

5 years ago when I purchased this coach, it had 4 brand new wet cell 8d's, 2 engine, 2 house. The only charger was the old 75 amp battery burner & no inverter. A year later, when I was ready to hit the road, I added a new inverter/charger & left the old battery burner in place for emergencys. One day I was sitting at a race track, running the genny waiiting for the batteries to charge. I would usually have the batteries merged when running off the batteries as the inverter would shut off long before the battery did not have enought power to start the genny. While my inverter charger puts out 145 amps, it still took a while to fully charge them. In as much as I had the old battery burner doing nothing, I hook it up to only the engine batteries, and now I can recharge quicker.
The original Interstate 8d's are still going strong especially considering the first year it was parked & plugged in to that old battery burner 24 / 7.