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what type of leisure battery is best?

marc674

Active member
Messages
190
Location
East sussex
Hi all looking for any advice on

What leisure battery would be best for a varistream 12v dc pump control, shurflow 8000 pump and one shot remote? How often do these batterys have to be charged ?

Also what do people reckon on the split charger systems? I dont do many miles in a day and all work close together. Fitted van out last week as had enough of back pack and 25L barrells!

 
A single operator will be fine using an 85 amph leisure battery. I would go with a 110 amp as they aren't that much more expensive.

I charge mine (110amph) every night in winter and every second night in summer with an intelligent leisure battery charger for motorhomes.

We also do limited mileage but I have a SCR (VSR now) as its nice to have a backup. We suffered a leisure battery failure about 5 years ago when we were miles out of area cleaning 2 large blocks of flats. We were able to run the van engine in a secure area and finish the job. Being able to do that paid for the SCR.

Halfords now do leisure batteries in our area (7 miles away.) Before that the best source was through the local motor factors next day delivery.

Leisure batteries don't like being run flat. They last longer when they are recharged as soon as possible.

As I've noted before, we believe that if we work an 8 hour day cleaning residential we estimate that our pumps will run for 50% of that time.

Using a flow controller, our pumps draw about 4.5 amps per hour. So 4 x 4.5 = 18 amps drawn that day. 110 amps - 18 = 92 amps remainding at the end of the day using 1 pump. 3 days work will leave your battery half charged. Leaving a leisure battery in the state of discharge will shorten its life, especially when left discharged for any length of time.

One of the local lads has 2 x 85 amp batteries and alternates them everyday, leaving the other on charge.

 
Totally agree with Spruce, I have just pimped my van and put a split relay charger in at the last minute - best descision by far. I have a webasto and start it up with the engine running then ditch it once it's warmed up. It lasted a full 6 hours (75Ah) and my pump runs continuously. Think I paid around £50 for a durite with cable and fuses - saved £25 on a lot brought one as I had heat shrink and terminals already. If I was to do it again I would buy the biggest battery I could afford (which is what I did at the time - my old battery failed in the middle of the day!)

What van do you have - access and cable routing could be an issue so I would check all this before you take the plunge. I already had the ply lining out of mine as it needed replacing so I took the plunge and fitted a reverse camera and s

 
Totally agree with Spruce, I have just pimped my van and put a split relay charger in at the last minute - best descision by far. I have a webasto and start it up with the engine running then ditch it once it's warmed up. It lasted a full 6 hours (75Ah) and my pump runs continuously. Think I paid around £50 for a durite with cable and fuses - saved £25 on a lot brought one as I had heat shrink and terminals already. If I was to do it again I would buy the biggest battery I could afford (which is what I did at the time - my old battery failed in the middle of the day!)What van do you have - access and cable routing could be an issue so I would check all this before you take the plunge. I already had the ply lining out of mine as it needed replacing so I took the plunge and fitted a reverse camera and s

A Webasto diesel heater is power hungry when starting and probably draws a little less current in operation than a Shurflo pump. My Airtronic diesel air heater will draw up to 20 amps starting and then will cruise on about 2.5 amps and in low heat mode about 1.2 amps. But the starting current is in short bursts. I also run the van engine when starting the heater as the alternator provides most of the starting load.

In 8 years I'm on my 3rd 110 amp leisure battery (the current one is just over a year old.) In all that time I've have never let the leisure battery voltage drop below 75% charged. From personal experience I'm also of the feeling that the initial boost of charge from the van's alternator when starting the engine gives the chemical reaction in the leisure battery a bit of a shake up. It doesn't seem to have done them any harm over the years.

(Numax are the manufacturers of Numax batteries and they told me that you should only charge a leisure battery at about 10% of its capacity. So a 110 amp battery would be charged at around 10 amps. When you have put a leisure battery under load the voltage of the battery drops. When the load is removed the battery voltage slowly stabilizes. This means it 'recovers'. So under load it could be reading 12.2 volts across the terminals even if the battery was fully charged at 12.8 - 12.9v before the load. When the load is removed the voltage will slowly rise until it settles on the level of the remaining charge. This stabilizing period is around 4 hours.

 


When we pack away and get into the van to come home, the battery reads a rather low voltage as it hasn't had time to 'recover.' The alternator 'sees' this as a flat battery so we have seen a power surge of up to 22 amps being driven into the leisure battery. However within a short period of time, within 30 seconds, it quickly settles down and we see a charge going in of around 6 to 7 amps.


 


With 2 pumps going we estimate that that we have used around 36 amps of the 110 amps we originally started with. Our journey home takes 10 to 15 minutes. If the journey took 15 minutes and we spent another 30 minutes traveling between jobs during the day we have only put back a little over 4.5 amps back into the battery. So we are still 30+ amps short. This is why I recharge every night in winter and every 2nd night in summer. When we do a large commercial in summer where we use more water, I put the battery on charge every night.


 


I'm fortunate that I'm have a drive way and plugging the charger in takes just a few moments. With it being an intelligent charger, I usually leave in plugged in over night.)


My VSR is also the same as a Durite 140 amp unit (M-Power.) I have run my cable from the starter motor (I stupidly didn't order enough cable to reach the battery. I was going to order some more cable and correct it but never have) and followed the wiring harness and brake pipes under the van which are attached to the chassis. I drilled a hole in the van floor near where the leisure battery is located and fitted the VSR in a box near the battery.

I have also put an on/off rocker switch on the earth cable from the VSR. By switching that off I can stop the VSR from working. (The Durite VSR is bi-directional. This means that when you put the charger on the leisure battery with the leisure battery in situ, the van battery also gets charged up.)

 
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I too put a switch before the leisure battery - for that same reason

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Also put a main isolation on my main control panel - bit over kill but I can isolate every circuit via a fuse and switch
939400fc920b4b5107240c4a3ac39190.jpg


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Totally agree with Spruce, I have just pimped my van and put a split relay charger in at the last minute - best descision by far. I have a webasto and start it up with the engine running then ditch it once it's warmed up. It lasted a full 6 hours (75Ah) and my pump runs continuously. Think I paid around £50 for a durite with cable and fuses - saved £25 on a lot brought one as I had heat shrink and terminals already. If I was to do it again I would buy the biggest battery I could afford (which is what I did at the time - my old battery failed in the middle of the day!)What van do you have - access and cable routing could be an issue so I would check all this before you take the plunge. I already had the ply lining out of mine as it needed replacing so I took the plunge and fitted a reverse camera and s
This is also a project I need to do. Please may I ask what camera and screen did you fitted and how well does it work in the dark? Thanks

 
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I will put the details in later. Colour camera, sensors and 5" screen was just over £50. Fantastic bit of kit and easy to fit. Surprisingly good in the dark [emoji6] as your reverse lights project light more than you think

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Also put a main isolation on my main control panel - bit over kill but I can isolate every circuit via a fuse and switch
939400fc920b4b5107240c4a3ac39190.jpg


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Wow, that's panel is busy but brilliant.

What diesel heater have you got? Also all those switch info labels. What did you use for those please?

It also looks like you have spend a lot of time in your van. I appreciate seeing the attention to detail and I find it motivating for me to get mine sorted. /emoticons/smile.png

 
I will put the details in later. Colour camera, sensors and 5" screen was just over £50. Fantastic bit of kit and easy to fit. Surprisingly good in the dark [emoji6] as your reverse lights project light more than you think

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Thank you

 
Bet you spent less than buying from Ionics /emoticons/tongue.png

You lads do my sweede in. Always feel like I need to go to the back of the class when @spruce is teaching. /emoticons/smile.png)

May I add (and my system is no where near so fancy) that I use a basic Tec3m SCR and only do short trips but used to find voltage would drop so sufficent to need to go on charge every 3-4 days (110mah)

Since I callibrated my controllers properly I have found that I seem to be using a lot less power. For example drove to first job yesterday, opened van and spotted that I had left my sysetm on since Thursday afternoon. Well annoyed at myself as I figured that would be a flat bat and the day a write off. Checked the voltage through the controller and was amazed to see 13.1

Would I be right to assume that when the controller DEs the pump the pump is no longer drawing power so really the only power I am losing is to the LED on the controller panel?

I have so much to learn! :thumbsup:

 
I've had a split charger relay since day 1 and admittedly I've never taken it out and charged the battery in over 2 years.

That's mainly cause I wasn't aware that it was needed / beneficial.

I still don't but sure the day will come when it packs in but I've got a spare for when that day does finally arrive.

My logic (which is mainly to justify laziness!) is that the money spent on a charger plus charging it over the space of two years probably adds up to the cost of a new battery.

 
I use a 115amp battery from Halfords and a Smartcom split relay to charge it. Had it on board for two years and never bench charged it.

 
Bet you spent less than buying from Ionics /emoticons/tongue.png
You lads do my sweede in. Always feel like I need to go to the back of the class when @spruce is teaching. /emoticons/smile.png)

May I add (and my system is no where near so fancy) that I use a basic Tec3m SCR and only do short trips but used to find voltage would drop so sufficent to need to go on charge every 3-4 days (110mah)

Since I callibrated my controllers properly I have found that I seem to be using a lot less power. For example drove to first job yesterday, opened van and spotted that I had left my sysetm on since Thursday afternoon. Well annoyed at myself as I figured that would be a flat bat and the day a write off. Checked the voltage through the controller and was amazed to see 13.1

Would I be right to assume that when the controller DEs the pump the pump is no longer drawing power so really the only power I am losing is to the LED on the controller panel?

I have so much to learn! :thumbsup:
My Varistream controller will still draw current. The dead end is an electronic pressure switch. It doesn't operate by sensing the pressure in the hose like a normal pressure switch does, but operates on what current the motor draws. When I switch my flow off pressure builds up in the hose because the pump keeps running. As the pressure builds up the pump has to work harder. The pump draws more current the harder it works. If I have calibrated my controller to cut of when the motor draws 6 amps, that's what it will do. That 6 amps cut-off will translate into pressure.

My controller doesn't have a setting in amps, but rather a lot of numbers and letters. If I remember correctly the setting starts at 1 and goes up to 9 and then A through to F. The factory setting is C which translates into 100 psi. C will be a preset amp draw and once that is reached it will cut the power supply to the pump.

Every 4 seconds the controller will send out a pulse current to test if the motor can be restarted. If the flow is still off, then the controller will rest for another 4 seconds before trying again. If I open the tap 2 seconds after the controller had tried to restart the pump, then I'm relying on the built up pressure to feed my brush for the next 2 seconds. The controller will send out another pulse and start the pump running.

I presume the Spring manufactured controllers work the same.

One thing I have come to realise is that there is a big difference between what the theory says and what happens in practice. What I found doesn't work for me may work for another. The split charge relay is a good example. We live within 8 miles of 80% of our cleans. We have 1 traffic light between home and those customers. So we spent minimal time on the road.

My van's alternator will charge my leisure battery at the same amps on idle as it does driving down the motor way at 4000 rpm. When I worked in Reading and stayed in Goring, I found it took me 3/4 of an hour to travel the last 3 miles into work. If I was in my van, my leisure battery would be better charged than if it took me 6 minutes to drive the same distance.

When my leisure battery is nearly fully charged my van's alternator is pushing 14.5v at it. When I switch off the engine the voltage will drop until it reaches 12.8 or 12.9v. That's the voltage the fully charged battery will be at when the voltage has completely stabilised after 4 hours.

If you got 13.2v then your battery hadn't completely stabilised. Had you let the battery stand and checked it after 4 hours, then you may have a reading in 12.4 volts which is 50% charged. There would still have been enough power in the battery to get you through the day. A discharged leisure battery will accept a faster charge than one that is nearly fully charged.

But again its all theory as you wouldn't wait 4 hours to see what the real state of your battery was.

A lot of what I write on here is my experience with 3 vans. When I first started wfp 11 years ago, there was very little info available to a DIYer. I had no clue how much current our pumps drew. The few who were wfp seemed to manage ok with 85 amp leisure batteries, so that's what I put in my son's van. But to be sure he always had enough battery power to finish his day's work I also fitted a change over switch so he could run his pump from the van's battery should he need to. I also fitted a split charge relay.

Experience then showed we didn't need that change over switch, so when I did the next van for myself I didn't include that option. When son in law joined us he traveled much further each day so didn't bench charge his leisure battery very often. He also did a lot of private mileage which also helped with addition battery charging.

You have a motorised hose reel. I would like have one as well, but when I do, that will be a learning curve for me. You are right, there is always so much to learn from others experiences.

And sometimes what you believe so strongly about turns out to be totally wrong. Someone has a better way which works and makes the job better.

 
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Spruce - didn't want to get too off topic and change the thread so I have put the camera details in the DIY section.

The labels were made on a cheapo brother label maker - similar to a Dymo. Cost around £12 I think then the tapes are £6 a pop. I used black on clear tape for the decals on my control panel.

I have a webasto thermo top c - it's from an ionic thermo pure system (pro 5 I think) that I have done a cut and shut job on to make it more compact and suit my van and what I need. I've just done a temporary 'fix' for the moment before I make some brackets up and hide the header tank and fuel tank round the side out of the way.

I will put full details of my van upgrade in the DIY section when I have done a few final tweaks - it will be an update to the thread I started a while ago asking for help on solving van condensation. Only seems fair that I share some info and little tricks/gadgets I have found useful.

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