House battery short?

[Out West]

I have a 39' 2006 Journey


I went on my first trip after replacing bad lead acid batteries with 2 new Battleborn 100 amp hr batteries.They were fully charged when we left for our first trip of the season Everything was fine for a really short time with very light usage. Every thing went dead. I went to check the batteries and they said 0 volts. The batteries are of course wired in parallel. It has two heavy positive cables coming from the coach.I disconnected them and the voltage read 10 volts. I disconnected the link between the batteries and when I took either of the coach cables to either of the batteries the voltage went from 10 to 0 volts. I left the batteries disconnected.
When we got home I tried to isolate the problem and the problem was gone. When I connected either cable to either battery it remained reading 10 volts.
I left the coach cables disconnected and reconnected the battery link and recharged them. They are just fine I reconnected the coach cables and all is well. Everything that was inside the coach was turned off and I am turning one thing on at a time slowly and waiting and checkning before moving on but I suspect I won't find anything.


Intermittent electrical is always a nightmare If you have any thoughts they would be greatly appreciated.


Thanls Wayne

[SLOweather]

Were the Battle Borns getting charged during your trip? How long is "a really short time"? What's "very light usage'? For instance, a 10 amp draw doesn't sound like much, but will drain a 100 AH battery in 10 hours...

[Morich]

It may sound really mean to say something like this but I suspect there was some type of error made during the testing. That would be one way to explain going from ten to zero on voltage. Otherwise, if you are putting a dead short on a battery to drop the voltage that much, you will get lots of bad reactions like smoke or welding. Have you worked on batteries and happened to tap a wrench over onto some part of the frame while getting a positive battery cable off? When I do it, it normally leaves a big black spot on the wrench and sometimes burns my fingers, so I now work really hard to avoid doing that!
But there are times when I am working and get really weird readings that should not happen and if I check carefully something has gone wrong on my test, like a meter lead has slipped out of the meter or I'm on the wrong scale or sometimes, it's just a mental thing and I just plain screwed up.
I hate to admit it but it happens to most of us! I blame it on gremlins!

[Out West]

it was truly a realy short time. I don't think we were there three hours before the problem happened and there was nothing more than radio, lights, TV. There were two batteries and the stuff I mentioned wasn't even on the whole time. The problem isn't really the discharge but the fact that they read 0 volts while connected to the coach and when disconnected read 10 volts which is pretty much what a dead 12 volts battery reads.
If there was not that connection I guess it would be incredibly bad luck to have two defective new battleborns. They couldn't have discharged from usage.
Thanks, Wayne

[Out West]

Sorry I missed your first point. The batteries were fully charged when we began the trip and the shore power was disconnected earlier the same morning and was only charged with the engingenerator while driving for an hour and a half. Then put on aux power when we parked at our destination.

The whole trip lasted aboy 11 hours.

[Out West]

I do know what you're saying and I may have to chalk it up to that in the end. But when the problem beagan, after things were working, I checked the house battery inside the coach there was no reading at all. when I took a meter to the two batteries directly before doing anything at all they read 0 volts before I did anything. I took the positive link between the two batteries and measured the voltage of the single battery disconnected and it measued 10 volts the other battery still connected to the coach measured 0 Volts. I disconnected that battery from the coach and it read 10 volts. I left them both disconnected from the coach. Reconnected the positive cable between both batteries and charged them fully with a stand alone 60 amp lithium charger until they were completely charged.
I put everything back together as it should be and all seemed ok.

The reason for the post is I was quite methodical in taking it apart and every thing is accurate about the coach connection causing the drain.
It make no sense to me either.