Hello: has anybody had experience with a Diamond Leisure 85AH battery, which we use to run the Whale water pump in our Pennine Fiesta folding camper.
I am currently charging it with a Linwood 4 amp car charger, the indicator is showing green (fully charged?) but is currently (no pun intended..) discharging around 3 amps.
Do I need a more powerful charger or keep on charging until it gets down to around 1 amp?
I have got a 110 ah Diamond Leisure battery but you should never use a car battery charger to force charge a leisure battery. They require a different type of charging unit because the batteries are constructed differently. A car battery has less internal lead plates but much thicker whereas a leisure battery has more plates but a lot thinner. With the plates being thinner they are likely to warp due to the excessive amperage input from a car battery charger therefore you need what they call a smart charger which charges in 4 stages at different levels rather than one constant 4 amp charge. You may well have now have a defective battery so you need to consult an auto technician to check to see how far the Diamond leisure battery has sulphated to a degree that it fails to hold a charge. You can read more about it in the link below.
A local user, welcome to the forum Oldbluenose, you're not a million miles away.
As Tango's has explained, a leisure battery needs charging differently to a conventional car battery (both batteries discharge at different rates). How long have you used the car charger for? Is the battery a so called 'maintenance free' model?
A smart charger that I can highly recommend is a CTec model, such as this MXS5.0 from Amazon. These have a 'maintenance mode' that analyse the battery condition and charge as appropriate (ignore the 'car battery' reference in the listing, these are suitable for conventional and leisure batteries).
Cheers folks, thanks for your reply, taken your comments on board and will be assessing the situation. Hopefully I haven't damaged it!! I have a local outdoor shop near to me and will probably take it down for them to check it out.
Thanks again, this is always a very good site, as usual...
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Topic: Battery Charging
