I have two electric connectors on the caravan tow bar hitch . One is black for the caravan lights (indicator etc) the other is grey for charging the battery and keeping the fridge cool. We have a twin tow hitch on the car. The leisure battery is very low can i connect my mains lead from the house to the grey connector to recharge the battery? ( the mains lead has a plug and a caravan connector plug to match the outlet on the caravan).
Or do I need to buy a leisure battery recharging unit to take into the house?
When at home we plug the mains plug into the house and the other end into the caravan like you would on hook up. Modern caravans will charge it, we were told to leave the fuse box switched on to do this. Older caravans I believe have a switch you need to flick to charge the battery. We also have a charger (pyramid smart charger) as we have a spare battery. When this is charged we just leave a solar trickle charger on it so that when we swap them over during our trip it is still fully charged.
The Grey connector will be drawing 12v from the car and yours house mains cable will be supplying 240v so no -it's not a good idea. If you have an electric hook up make up an adaptor (or buy one) to connect your van direct to your mains house supply
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We have an old Monza delux .. It has a fuse box, we have been plugging the hookup to the house but that doesnt seem to be charging the leisure battery.. Maybe we didnt leave it on long enuff.. How long would it take to charge ?..
I think I might just buy a charger to use in the house so I know for sure it is charging the battery.. I have purchased a volt meter (waiting for its arrival) to test how much charge is in the battery this should help...
If you connect the electrics to the household supply in the same way as you would if you were connecting to electric hook-up on site then that would be OK, but do not try and connect the 12v car connector to the mains. If you use EHU on a site, or even at home (in the way I have described in the first sentance) it should recharge the leisure battery, but I think the charger units in the van are mainly to keep the charge in the battery. If the battery needed recharging from 'dead' it probably wouldn't/may not do it. (Don't know why - this is what I was told when we had our first van... but that has been some years ago now so things may have 'moved on'.) I'm sure there are those on here who would know better than I, in this respect.
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Topic: Charging a leisure battery
