Has anyone managed to buy a euro 13 plug and socket extension cable to charge the leisure battery up when not on electrical hook up. You can always reach the camper electrics with the car when on setup on site. Regards
Most properly installed trailer electrics are designed to protect the car battery, so the pins used to charge the leisure battery/operate the fridge won't be live when the engine is off.
Looking at the pennine circuit diagram, when switched +ve is on (engine is running) the camper isolates all other 12V electrics other than the fridge and the leisure battery, so lights and water pump would not work. And when the switched +ve is off (engine not running), the leisure battery is isolated from the car battery (the car/van switch simply lets you use the car battery or leisure battery to run the lights/pumps)
Parky15, thanks for the reply, on the fiesta the entrance door is on the rear so the A frame is normally close to a hedge on your pitch and unable to hook the car electrics on to charge the leisure battery. I was thinking of running a euro 13 pin extension lead from the car (engine running) to the camper to charge if needed. Do you know if you can purchase one?
You can buy them, towsure do one (Maypole) although only 8pins connected and does not specify which ones, but I saw one on eBay with all pins connected. Just google 13pin extension lead.
From memory, the fridge takes about 4-5 amps, so a fully charged 110Ah leisure battery will last less than a day (and that would be a deep discharge which I'm not sure is good).
I don't know what the charging current from an idling car would be. The fuse is 20amps on that circuit so at best you would have 4:1 ratio of fridge time to car idling time.
Tempted to agree with Navver, a solar panel might be better. We use a little 20W cell to keep the battery trickle charged at home, but you can get 50 or 100W cells which, if starting with a full charge, might keep you going for a while in nice weather. The hardest part will be re-wiring it as the pennine electrics do not have a connection between the leisure battery and fridge (presumably due to the impracticalities of using a leisure battery for this purpose and risk accidentally flattening your battery). The fridge is only wired into the 13pin socket directly.
For weekend trips we just use the fridge on gas, I worked out its about five pounds a day (obviously depends on ambient temperature and starting temperature of fridge) to run it on gas, but we turn it off at night as ambient is cooler then and its safer. Not much different from the cost of EHU at some sites, and fine provided you carry 2 gas bottles around.
Re-read OP. No idea where i picked up running a fridge from, so ignore my response about fridges
If the load on the battery is only likely to be the normal 12V electrics (pumps and lights and charging phones etc), then a solar panel will be far better . Even a 20W panel would help there. We have a charge controller on ours, and the set up was still very cheap, and I read somewhere that you don't really need a charge controller for a low wattage panel (double check that). I managed to fit the charge controller inside the battery box and connected to battery terminals via a fused link, so have not needed to touch the camper electrics and feed the lead in through EHU cable entry.
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Topic: Pennine fiesta charging
