Hello YouTube I'm not Chuck and I decided to add a second house battery to
my travel trailer in order to have longer times that I can use the
batteries the batteries between charging as you can see my battery is
located on the tongue of the travel trailer I currently only have one
battery and it's in that black case that you see on the screen first thing we
need to do before we access the battery is make sure that the gas is turned
completely off from the bottle on the front of the trailer that is done by
turning the knob clockwise then to disconnect the cable turn that connector
counterclockwise sniff to make sure I don't smell any propane and if I do I
put the connector back on really quick and figure out what the problem is the
next step is to take the strap off the battery box so I can remove the lid and
expose the battery itself the strip goes completely around the battery box in the
lid and underneath the rails supporting the battery holding the entire assembly
to the rails on the trailer the top just lifts off after the strap is removed so
here's my battery you can see there are two places to make electrical
connections the one on the right is the ground connection the one on the left
was disconnected that's the plus DC voltage connector and I don't leave it
connected unless I'm using the batteries for some purpose that prevents the
battery from being discharged by something left on inside the trailer
what I'm going to do now is take a look at the current battery voltage and
therefore determine what the level of charge is it should be about twelve
point six volts as you can see it's down to twelve point two volts which is not
bad but since there's been nothing draining the battery it should have
stayed at twelve point six volts so I've decided to replace that battery with a
better one in order to remove the ground cable from the battery I'll need a half
Finch socket the stud on the battery is a 5/16 18 thread per inch stud but I
need a half-inch socket to fit those two hex nuts and I'm taking off once I get
the cable off I'll just let it hang loose there is no danger to that
whatsoever there's the old battery or the somewhat weak battery being removed
and here's a better battery being put in at least I think it's better first thing
I do is check the voltage on that battery and see how it looks as you can
see the voltage there is 12 point 6 volts indicating that the battery is
fully charged all right I slid that battery and the battery box that holds
it over to the right to make room for my second battery first thing I need to do
is put in a battery box to hold it as you saw on the end of the battery box
it's a group 24 which refers to the size of the battery next thing will be to
drop the new battery or newer battery down in the battery box now as you can
see on the new battery there are a couple of wing nuts there and on the
battery on the right there are a couple more hex nuts the first thing I want to
do is take those wing nuts and hex nuts off put them in a safe place because
I'll be using them to attach the cables again the wing nuts come off with just
finger tighten Asst this case looks like the hex nuts weren't on there very tight
so I just took those off by hand as well if I had needed a wrench it would have
taken a half-inch wrench or half-inch socket
these batteries are Interstate Batteries they're deep cycle batteries intended
for RV or in use and the model number on the
batteries is an SRM - 24 I really like Interstate Batteries
they're not the cheapest ones they're not the most expensive ones but they
seemed a good give good value for the money these cost about a hundred and
twenty dollars each brand-new now the next step is to begin connecting the two
batteries together that'll take two heavy cables to connect the two
batteries together one going from the positive terminal on one battery to the
positive terminal on the other battery just as you see in the picture so I'll
put that heavy cable up there that happens to be a 1 gauge cable and I'll
put the 2 hex nuts and spin them down somewhat loosely to keep that red cable
from moving around I use red for the positive on both batteries and I'll have
a black cable that I'll put on the negative side the negative terminal of
both batteries and I'll Snug it down just exactly like I did the red cable
for the positive leads again I'm using a couple of hex nuts to secure loosely
secure both ends of that black cable on the negative terminals and I'll snug all
four nuts down again with my half-inch socket
as I talk in the socket you'll notice that I don't really put a lot of force
on it we want a good electrical connection we want to tight enough that
it won't vibrate loose but we don't want to take a chance on damaging the battery
or the battery terminals by over tightening those two nuts so just get
them snug but don't over-tighten them and run the risk of breaking something
inside the battery all right those seem to be in pretty good shape so now I have
my two batteries connected in what is called parallel the next thing I'll do
is reconnect the positive wires that go to the travel trailer I put the ring
terminal over the stud and tighten that down with one of the wing nuts in this
case as you can see I'm only going to tighten that hand tight there's no
reason to put a wrench on that I could have put it by the way on either one of
the positive terminals but I'm going to make both connections here on the
left-hand battery there's electrically no difference considering that I have
very heavy cables connecting the two batteries together once again I'm using
a wing nut to put that ground back on and at this point I'm electrically
reconnected with two batteries in parallel feeding my travel trailer next
step will be to to tidy up the cables and put the battery box cover back on
both batteries so I'll do the left one as you can see here and I'll finish up
when it's snug down I'll finish up by putting the other battery box cover on
the right battery box and putting both straps back in place I'll make sure that
both straps go under the frame rails to hold the batteries in place I'll
reconnect the propane line to the tank if I needed to turn the propane back on
I would but in this case I don't and the fourth step is to confirm that I
actually do have 12-volt DC you the RV by turning on a light so that
does it I'll see you on the next video and remember I'm not Chuck