What You Need to Know Before an RV Lithium Battery Upgrade

I originally believed, mistakenly, that replacing the lead acid batteries in my RV with lithium cells only required a battery change. Not at all. If this is how you felt as well, the following video from Enjoy The Journey Life’s Tom and Cheri about RV lithium upgrades for beginners will tell you three crucial things you should know before doing such a job.

An Enduro specialist in lithium batteries joins. When starting your adventure, he advises these three factors should be your first consideration when thinking about upgrading your RV’s lithium battery.

Which Size Battery Bank Is Best for You?

This will be the first question to address when it comes to upgrading to a lithium battery for novices. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but 200 amp hours is a good starting point for most RVers who just require basic power to run a 12-volt fridge. The amount of electricity you use personally and the length of time you want to live off the grid will determine the rest.

Is Your Converter Compatible with Lithium?

The likelihood is that your converter will work with lithium batteries if your RV was built in 2022 or later. Your chances of that decreasing with age are higher. But the video suggests that it’s a rather straightforward swap-out.

Upgrade RV lithium batteries: It goes beyond simply changing batteries.

Okay, so I had a service appointment to get my new lithium batteries put and they were on their way. Knowing nothing about this subject, I had to become educated rapidly.

I was installing new lithium batteries on an older travel trailer, so it didn’t take long to realize I needed more than just the batteries. Since my trailer’s converter was not working as well as it should with the new batteries, it was among the first items that needed to be replaced. I was initially under the impression that I required a separate battery charger while I was sifting through the vast amount of material about upgrading lithium batteries. However, this is done by the RV’s converter, thus a lithium battery charger is not required.

Keep in mind that many contemporary RVs come pre-wired for upgrades to lithium batteries, so depending on the type of RV you own, you might not need to replace your converter.

Lithium Battery Charger, DC to DC Conversion

Installing a DC-to-DC charger was also necessary because driving would not provide enough power to charge the batteries.

Additional Battery Metre

Although the expert in the movie suggests against it, adding a lithium battery monitor with a shunt is strongly recommended. The starting voltage profile of lithium batteries is greater (12.8 vs. 13.6 vs. 12.8) than that of lead acid or AGM batteries, which is the explanation behind this. This indicates that compared to lead acid batteries, lithium batteries produce power much more efficiently and maintain a constant voltage for a much longer period of time before dying. You can monitor how much power you have available, how much is being taken from your batteries by load, and how much is being charged at any one time with the battery monitor.

You can use the battery monitor with your present lead acid batteries to figure out exactly how much power you actually need in your lithium battery bank if you’re not sure how much you actually need. As lead acid batteries never dip below 50%, it can also assist you control how much you use of them.

The technician who set up the new gear for me said he had never worked with lithium devices before and he was amazed. He was very pleased with how simple it was to install and operate their DC-to-DC charger thanks to lithium. He even claimed that it was simply “plug and play”!

This is due to the fact that the lithium DC-to-DC charger has an output terminal, an ACC wire, a solar input terminal, and a DC input terminal to improve the solar, alternator, beginning, and service batteries’ operational efficiency.

Watch for lithium batteries. I also bought a battery monitor with a shunt. This update is amazing. Before, my RV’s monitors were the only thing I needed to use to check the battery levels. There were only four options available: charging/full, medium, low, and dead.

Lithium’s battery monitor, on the other hand, provides me with an exact battery power reading in a range of 1 to 100. Along with battery voltage, current, power, and capacity, the display also shows the charge/discharge indicator, capacity percentage, and the amount of charge or discharge time left. For ease of use at night, it even features a lighting.