multi battery isolator with booster switching

The Orion will not however change your starter battery from the house battery.įar as I can see the DC-DC converter plus a set of jumper cables (in the event you need to jump start the engine from the house battery) will do everything you need. Nor will it prevent your house battery from cooking the alternator if the house batteries are at too low of a SOC when you try to charge them from the alternator.Ī DC-DC charger (like an Victron Orion TR) will provide both charge management for your new lithium batteries and will also protect against draining the starter battery with house loads. What the isolate will not do is protect your LiFePo4 house battery from being overcharged by the alternator. Voltage Sensitive Relay (VSR) isolators behave as HRTKD describe - they only pass current to the house battery when the starter battery is fully charged, but I doubt that’s what you have now given the age of your RV.Ĭlick to expand.The isolator is there so that running the house loads in the RV can't drain the starter batteries stranding you in the middle of nowhere. Neither the Renogy nor my stock isolator care about the voltage of the starter battery so I suppose if it’s borderline the additional load of the charger could make starting even harder. As mentioned any “Battery boost” function (we have a switch on our dash) that would use house batteries to start the vehicle if the start battery is dead won’t work. This is exactly what the stock relay isolator in my RV does except that when the Renogy is engaged current can only flow one way.

So if the ignition is off no current is drawn from the starter battery. It takes a positive current from the vehicle ignition switch to start charging. I don’t know what the consequences if any would be if both were used but the Renogy DC-DC charger has isolation built in. Most discussions I have seen talk about either/or not both. I am in the same process and pondering the same question. #2) If I install a DC>DC charger, do I remove the 20 year old battery isolator? Or do I use them both somehow? #1) Do I correctly understand the situation and the role of the DC>DC charger? They advise installing a DC>DC charger, like this one, to regulate current draw from the alternator to the batteries. Some experts believe LiFeP04s can draw so much current when charging that they damage the alternator. Now I am considering upgrading my batteries to LiFePO4, and I understand this system might not cut it anymore. There is an isolator that prevents the house electrical from draining the starter battery. So my Covid-19 project is to upgrade it all.Ĭurrently, the alternator charges both the starter and the house batteries. State of the art for the year 2000, that is. I have a Roadtrek Class B motorhome with a state of the art electrical system. I have extensively RTFF and learned a lot. In this case, I would like to isolate the negative side of the battery.Hi Gang! Newbie here and this is my first post. So if not a kill switch, then with a simple 2-pole isolator. I understand that simply turning off the ignition leaves the battery connected.Įither way, I do want some way to disconnect the battery when the car is in storage. My main argument against the kill switch is that it adds another potential failure point to the electrical system. It's not clear to me if the kill switches became popular purely because of racing mandates (for track marshals to be able to kill engine). Is it useful to have a driver-accessible kill switch or is it still safe to use the tried and tested method of simply turning off the ignition on a road car (I have one of those aircraft-style ignition switches you can quickly flip off).

This will be mostly a road track, with a little trackday use. I'm building a kitcar electrical system from scratch and am not sure if I want a battery isolator or an engine kill switch (which will ground alternator in addition to disconnecting the battery).

Multi battery isolator with booster switching