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| Jumping a car with an RV battery? |
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| vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: antman_430 on June 25, 2021, 06:31:05 pm ---So my father was a commercial electrician through the 1970’s-2000’s in New York City and always had unique solutions to electrical problems around the house. Sadly, he passed away well before I got my degree in physics and would’ve been able to better appreciate/understand what he was doing. There was one time in particular that leaves me stumped to this day and I was hoping someone could help me put together the pieces to make sense of it. I was about 10 years old and our truck battery died while a friend was letting us stay in their log cabin. It was pretty remote, so nobody else was around with a car, but the friend had a small pop-up camper in their driveway with its own battery. I’m not sure what other tools my dad had available to him beyond a set of jumper cables and basic workshop tools. We also would’ve had the log cabin that was being powered by the electrical grid, but I don’t particularly remember my father going into the house itself while try to do this. It’s definitely possible that he did though, so I don’t necessarily want to write that off as a possibility. Obviously this isn’t enough information for you to reconstruct what exactly he *may* have done to jump this battery, so I guess the better question is: Given these supplies (rv battery and jumper cables), how would you go about jumping this car battery? And, in the case that these supplies are insufficient, what additional supplies would you need (short of another running car) to actually jump the battery? Thanks! --- End quote --- I guess when you say "truck" you don't mean a hulking great Mack, but more like a "pickup truck" (what we would call a "ute" in Oz) or light flat tray truck. I make this point, because big trucks use 24v electrical systems so would be incompatible with a normal 12v RV battery, but the other, smaller, ones use 12v systems. |
| NiHaoMike:
Some RVs, most notably ones with air conditioning, use 24V to get the current down to a more manageable level. Nowadays, some RVs even use 48V batteries. Those can still jump start 12V vehicles by tapping off a portion of the batteries, at the cost of getting them a little out of balance. |
| vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on June 28, 2021, 03:08:58 am ---Some RVs, most notably ones with air conditioning, use 24V to get the current down to a more manageable level. Nowadays, some RVs even use 48V batteries. Those can still jump start 12V vehicles by tapping off a portion of the batteries, at the cost of getting them a little out of balance. --- End quote --- It is a bit hard translating from US pickup truck owner talk, as so many call a pickup a "truck", whereas an Australian would definitely distinguish the two. My initial response was maybe the reverse to what happened, if RVs use 24 or 48v batteries. |
| james_s:
The vast majority of RVs, at least old RVs use 12V. I think it's safe to say that the trailer had a 12V deep cycle house battery and this was used to jumpstart the truck. This is all pretty straightforward, a deep cycle battery would not last long being used frequently to start a truck but it will certainly work. I've jump started a car with a small 12V SLA battery, virtually any lead-acid battery can deliver an enormous current although it will greatly reduce the life of those not designed to tolerate it. |
| BrokenYugo:
Campers usually contain a 12 volt lead acid battery to power the lights, propane furnace, etc. Simple matter of yanking it out, lugging it over to the dead vehicle and hooking up the jumper cables. Even if it was a deep cycle type and not dual purpose or a car battery (cheaper as there's less lead in them) there'd likely be enough current to do the job if the truck battery wasn't totally dead, especially in summer. Sometimes you see something similar done at garages, a sort of super jump pack made from an especially large salvaged car/truck battery strapped to a hand truck, with a pair of heavy gauge jumper cables hanging off it. |
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