Hi, I want to but the kit to wire up a leisure battery. On the JK site you have a Split charge kit for £75 and a Dual charge for £25 aswell as others. Whats the difference? What kit should I use for basic leisure battery (only radio and phone charger)
100 amp relay on the £75 kit, seems expensive for what you get. http://www.justkampers.com/heavy-du...w-t2-split-1955-1967-vw-t2-bay-1967-1979.html
Definately OTT. If your alt was charging at 100A (which it can't), you'd have smoldering cables in the engine compartment
A boggo 40A automotive relay from Halfords will do you nicely. One with a built-in fuseholder better. About 7 quid.
I fitted this to the van last year. no problems so far http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Great-Val...-Duty-Relay-/261367056209?hash=item3cdab0c751
Mine was £16.50 from Ebay- works perfectly well and had some spare wire. Boggo 40A 12V relay, couple of fuse holders, some wire, some connectors. That's all it is. Some of them have fancy monitoring systems and such, but as long as it works fine there's no need to change it.
I've got one like this in my engine bay, not fitted by me - are you saying this is way beyond what I need? And if so, is there any advantage to replacing it? Or does it do exactly the right job, but just in an OTT way?
No, it's fine. It's an electronic unit that connects your leisure battery when the engine's running, much the same as the relay-and-alt-light method. It'll (apparently) handle 140A, which is way more than you'll ever need (or get).
Okay, so as long as it charges my leisure battery - which it appears to do, although not to a stunningly high voltage (12.6v is about it) - it's fine. Ta @snotty
The rather nice VSR will only start charging the leisure battery once the starter battery is pretty well charged. But 12.6 is pretty close to fully charged for a battery that has been resting since being charged. One nice thing is if @scrooge95 only connects a solar cell to the leisure battery the VSR should automatically allow the starter battery to be charged off the leisure battery once the leisure battery is well charged without any more wiring.
Bearing in mind electrickery isn't something I'm hugely savvy about (I can wire lights and plugs and do the maths so I don't blow a 13A ring circuit etc, but more than that is a bit beyond me!) I'm using a multimeter and a probe touching the appropriate battery terminal. If I go by the cheap Chinese voltmeter / USB charge socket thingie inside the van, it tells me I reach the dizzy heights of 12.3v. It did read higher (over 13v) when I had a solar panel attached on me holidays, but it dropped down to 12.3v as soon as night fell. TBH the leisure battery seems to be losing charge a bit this last month or so, even though I use the van for work every week or so - so I'm tempted to think something is draining it. Propex maybe, as that's the only thing that's changed this year, but I'm not sure how. Oh these vans hey, always something to think about! So if I go solar in April with one of them flexi jobs on the roof, this is good? (I was going to get one of those MPPT boxes of course, so are they compatible?) @Day sorry for the blatant thread hijack!
Measuring at the battery's fine. Anything connected up front is going to include the voltage drop in the main feed to the front of the van. Does sound like your leisure batt may be slowly expiring. What's the voltage on it with the engine running?
No ctek yet, so I'm afraid that's not it. Either the battery is on it's way out (hopefully not as it's not been in the van much more than 2 years), or there's a drain somewhere. I'll explore tomorrow - and check voltage on both batteries with and without the engine running. I do have a quite large starter battery (a Bosch S5 008 77Ah) so whether the leisure doesn't get much trickled over by the time the starter battery has charged maybe? Who knows. I'll poke it tomorrow and stick me probes on it's terminals.
