Hi guys,
We’ve had a couple of occurrences of a weird, apparently random, issue with our charger/leisure battery setup. We have a CTEK D250SA charger, solar panel and LiFOS68 battery. Not sure if there’s anything else relevant. First time we parked up overnight a few months ago we were alarmed to discover the next morning we’d lost all power and had to connect to a hookup. We explained what happened to our installer but never got to the bottom of what the problem was; since then we’ve never once used the hookup and never ever seen the charge indicator for the leisure battery on our CBE DS100 control panel drop below 3 LEDs, I.e. fully charged, so the solar panel seemed to be doing its stuff and we forgot about the incident.
However this afternoon we had a recurrence of the problem, this is what happened....
We’ve been parked up at a campsite in the south of France for 48 hours in mostly bright sunshine, the leisure battery has remained fully charged (I habitually check it on the control panel from time to time). However late afternoon I suddenly noticed it had dropped to 1 LED lit, then after a minute of so this changed to a red flashing LED indicating the battery was about to expire. We had nothing drawing any unusual charge. I noted 2 particularly strange things. The LEDs on the charger didn’t correspond to any pattern shown in the user manual, with only the solar panel LED lit. And when I fired up the ignition, the alternator LED lit but the battery LED still did not. Sure enough after another few minutes we lost all power. Fortunately we had access to a hookup, and the strangest thing was that after connecting it, the charge indicator on the control panel almost immediately showed 2 LEDs and then 3 a couple of minutes later.
Given this evidence (surely the battery doesn’t fully charge from hookup in a couple of minutes!?) I can’t believe that this is a problem with our battery. And given that firing up the ignition didn’t help it surely can’t be our solar panel. So my best guess is that this is an intermittent fault with the CTEK charger.
Has anybody here any pearls of wisdom that might shed some light on this? For the meantime at least we’re safe in the knowledge we can carry on our holiday, but my wife’s ambition to go off grid in Aires might have to wait until we get to the bottom of this.
One other thing.... we discovered that our hookup cable wasn’t compatible with the french electric points and we were very lucky that the office were able to lend us an adaptor. Are french/UK adaptors easy to buy in France and if so, where??
We’ve had a couple of occurrences of a weird, apparently random, issue with our charger/leisure battery setup. We have a CTEK D250SA charger, solar panel and LiFOS68 battery. Not sure if there’s anything else relevant. First time we parked up overnight a few months ago we were alarmed to discover the next morning we’d lost all power and had to connect to a hookup. We explained what happened to our installer but never got to the bottom of what the problem was; since then we’ve never once used the hookup and never ever seen the charge indicator for the leisure battery on our CBE DS100 control panel drop below 3 LEDs, I.e. fully charged, so the solar panel seemed to be doing its stuff and we forgot about the incident.
However this afternoon we had a recurrence of the problem, this is what happened....
We’ve been parked up at a campsite in the south of France for 48 hours in mostly bright sunshine, the leisure battery has remained fully charged (I habitually check it on the control panel from time to time). However late afternoon I suddenly noticed it had dropped to 1 LED lit, then after a minute of so this changed to a red flashing LED indicating the battery was about to expire. We had nothing drawing any unusual charge. I noted 2 particularly strange things. The LEDs on the charger didn’t correspond to any pattern shown in the user manual, with only the solar panel LED lit. And when I fired up the ignition, the alternator LED lit but the battery LED still did not. Sure enough after another few minutes we lost all power. Fortunately we had access to a hookup, and the strangest thing was that after connecting it, the charge indicator on the control panel almost immediately showed 2 LEDs and then 3 a couple of minutes later.
Given this evidence (surely the battery doesn’t fully charge from hookup in a couple of minutes!?) I can’t believe that this is a problem with our battery. And given that firing up the ignition didn’t help it surely can’t be our solar panel. So my best guess is that this is an intermittent fault with the CTEK charger.
Has anybody here any pearls of wisdom that might shed some light on this? For the meantime at least we’re safe in the knowledge we can carry on our holiday, but my wife’s ambition to go off grid in Aires might have to wait until we get to the bottom of this.
One other thing.... we discovered that our hookup cable wasn’t compatible with the french electric points and we were very lucky that the office were able to lend us an adaptor. Are french/UK adaptors easy to buy in France and if so, where??
.
