Proper external charge hookup

[Joel Ashley]

Our inverter quit on me, probably the d*** squirrels nesting and evacuating atop it again, and it hadn’t been keeping the batteries up in storage.  Nor apparently was the solar system, even with the main switches off.  When I went in for my weekly check, I found the inverter’s remote with odd readouts I’d not seen before, not the usual state of charge one.  I couldn’t get the inverter to reset, so will likely have to remove, clean, open up, and hopefully repair its circuitry.

But I need to resurrect the 6v AGM battery set.  It’s been awhile, so refresh my memory about external charging them.  It’s the typical two 6v in series tied to another pair via parallel.  My 40 year-old DieHard charger kept kicking off after every 5 minutes, which it’s done before in my rarely driven F150.  So I got a modern “Noco Genius 10” charger and hooked it up tonight.  I assumed negative clamp to one battery’s -post and positive clamp to its series partner’s +post. 

I note the same voltage on both pairs, but is there another better hookup, like black clamp to -post of one series pair and red clamp to the +post of the second battery in the other series pair?  No difference, given they're tied together and there’s 12v among them regardless?  As such, I may have a long wait to finally top up, but won’t have to move the clamps to the second pair?

I should and used to know this stuff, but recent health circumstances often befouls my memory and logical processing.

Joel

[David T. Richelderfer]

When our inverter went on the fritz several years ago, I went out and purchased a charger that was 3-way selectable - a low amp maintenance setting, a 15 amp setting, and a 50 amp engine-starting setting.  So I hooked the red charger cable to where the inbound red cable from inside the coach connected to the first battery post, and connected the black charger cable to where the outbound black cable going back to the coach connected to the last battery post.  That way, I got all six of our 6V batteries charging at once.  I hope that makes sense to you.  lol

I recently had charging problems on my two 12V chassis batteries.  The darn Big Boy had been an increasing problem for a couple years, becoming intermittent in its operation.  So I hooked a jumper cable between the two connections on the Big Boy.  In the meantime, I ordered a new Big Boy and BIRD.  After replacing both the Big Boy and BIRD, the batteries are maintaining quite well.