No Battery??

[Keith Williams]

If I am going to have shore power at all times, except when towing, can I leave the battery out of the Casita? Should I tape the ends of the wire that would normally connect to the battery , or is there an "off" switch in the control / converter panel?

EKW

[Phillip]

If I am going to have shore power at all times, except when towing, can I leave the battery out of the Casita? Should I tape the ends of the wire that would normally connect to the battery , or is there an "off" switch in the control / converter panel?

EKW

Yes you could leave iit out if you not going to need it... and Yes I would tape up the ends..or . you might want to see if you can figure out if you have a charger on board and remove or disconnect it also to avoid having a hot 12v end that could happen while your connected to 120v

[Dave Fish]

With a 17', you definitely need the battery in. That is what powers your brakes should your trailer disconnect from your TV. That is a rare occurrence but I had one break loose many years ago and break the chains. It did not have brakes but fortunately it stopped before going over a 100' drop.

Dave

[Keith Williams]

It sounds like you are both correct, in that I could run without one, but Dave's point about the brakes is a good one. I went and bought a new battery today, anyway, and it's installed.

My problem has been that I just bought this trailer in early April and and I'm working through those "unknown" things. It's in excellent shape but I think the battery was shot when I got the Casita. I checked it, when I got home, and it was very dry, I filled the cells, and then we went on a 3,000 mile trip and then the battery went dead about 2/3 of the way home. When I took it out yesterday, it was BONE DRY and I'm sure it had boiled itself dry. I filled it up again and put it on the charger last night and this morning it was just "boiling away" so I shut down the charging and bought a new one.

Steve L, and some reading I've done on this forum have convinced me that some of the cells were bad so both the trailer system and my charger were trying to charge a bad battery, hence the boiling.

I checked the output of the Contol/Converter in the trailer on the battery wires and it was about 13.7 or so as near as I could tell. So that shouldn't hurt the new battery, I hope. Now I'm going to look into a battery disconnect switch and install a meter so I can read the Battery "state" from inside the trailer. I think I've read about all that here on this forum. Hope I can find it now.

Thanks to both of you.

EKW

[Bill K]

I use a meter that plugs into a 12v power outlet. ( Walmart ) inexpensive

Bill K

Now I'm going to look into a battery disconnect switch and install a meter so I can read the Battery "state" from inside the trailer. I think I've read about all that here on this forum. Hope I can find it now.

Thanks to both of you.

EKW

[Donna D.]

How about a DEAD battery? The one on my Scamp has totally discharged... and I still have brakes.... at least I did last weekend when I towed to the Washington Gathering.

[Gina D.]

your brakes will work from your brake line wire from your truck.

However, the breakaway SWITCH will not work..

BUT..there is a workaround for that if you really don't want a battery.

breakaway switch box/kit with small battery

[Elvin Lowe]

EKW,

I have a 2002 17' Casita and with the converter that came with it removing the battery from the system caused voltages up to 20 volts when connected to 110AC.

I don't know if Casita changed the converter after 2002 and before 2006 or not.

Just a point of information.

[Ed Harris]

In general the battery in these rigs acts as a filter to help smooth out the D.C. voltages from the converter.
When you are on shore power the converter is still making D.C and lighting the lights and other 12VDC stuff in the rig.

Because of the nature of the converters in these and the tendency to generate erratic voltages I would still make sure I had a battery installed as they can be very effective at helping to regulate the D.C. voltage supplied all the time when plugged in or not.

Make sense?

Ed

[Elvin Lowe]

Ed is correct.

When I decided to wire my trailer to use the system without the battery the engineers at Parallax were great at support as to how the converters operate, conversions of the converter as well as technical support of all kinds.