caravan battery monitoring

Why you need to monitor your caravan battery?

Battery age, discharge current and temperature, among other things, all influence the capacity and health of your RV’s house batteries. And, as ‘they’ say, prevention is better than cure, so that’s why observing the health of your batteries is crucial.
And in this day and age, precise supervision of your battery status isn’t an exact science.

Understanding efficient and reliable monitoring can help advise of impending battery failure, increase battery capacity, and extend battery life.

It’s all about maximising your battery’s performance and managing your power consumption. For starters, no intrepid camper relishes the thought of warm beer when they’re parked up hundreds of miles from the nearest watering hole.

Which parameters to monitor

Most battery monitors only display the available volts and amps being consumed from a battery, which is like a car only telling you how fast you are travelling – but not how much fuel you have to sustain that speed, or how long until your fuel runs out.

Volts and amps alone don’t give RVers a comprehensive insight into the state of their battery. But the fully integrated battery monitoring systems by BMPRO – Drifter and Trek – take monitoring technology to a whole new level, providing RVers with useful ‘state of health’ and ‘state of charge’ information.

The first-generation Drifter allows you to take control and manage the state of your 12V battery life. It acts as a ‘fuel gauge’ by monitoring and displaying information such as battery volts and amps, charge/discharge status, remaining capacity and remaining time, and water tank levels.

BMPRO way to monitor 12V battery

BMPRO’s technology counts the energy put into the battery via the charger and the energy taken out during use. Drifter is permanently wired in to your 12V electrical system and continuously monitors the battery voltage and charge current. It uses this information together with time and temperature and several parameters that are set by the user to model the battery’s behaviour and to estimate the actual charge left in the battery. This enables it to display a simple fuel gauge of the capacity state of charge (SOC) of the battery. And it is compatible with any deep cycle 12V lead acid battery.

Its LCD display unit (with backlight for night viewing) also has the capacity to monitor the levels of up to four water tanks, and also displays information such as current flowing out (discharging); estimated battery charge status and the estimated time to discharge; time (digital clock) with am/pm; ambient temperature; water pump status; and battery on/off status.

The updated, state-of-the-art Trek combines comprehensive battery data together with water tank level measurement in a sleek new design. Trek monitors and displays vital battery information such as volts and amps, charge and discharge status, remaining capacity and water tank levels by connecting directly to power management systems such as the BP35 range via a CANbus connection.