Cleaning the batteries

When we were in Virginia last year about this time of year (probably more into November), Dwayne cleaned off the house batteries, making sure all the connections were in good shape.

After a year of travel, they had gotten pretty dirty... we don't actually know whether they have air openings in the top - we think they are fully sealed, but decided they needed cleaning anyway...

You may be able to see that there was some corrosion on the front battery in the top tray. We found that the connections weren't as tight as we would like for them to be, and the nuts on the connectors were such that it made it very hard to tighten them.

Dwayne was able to get new bolts and nuts so he was able to tighten the connectors more effectively. He also has secured the batteries with wood pieces to keep them from sliding around on the trays - we think that may have contributed to at least one of the connection being loosened as it was being stretched since the batteries had migrated to the forward part of the tray.

The next time we are at Jimmy's, we want to work on the mechanism on the bottom slide out tray - it is pretty difficult to get it to roll in and out. The batteries are VERY heavy - between the two of us we can *barely* lift just one of them, there are 6 of them, and two per tray.

We also may have the folks at National Indoor RV evaluate the efficacy of our house batteries - other RVers have indicated that we should be able to run our refrigerator on our batteries for much longer than the few hours that we experience when boondocking. More things to figure out about the bus!!!