It’s summer time so I’ve been leaving my refrigerator running all day for the last couple months. I bought my truck into the shop for a check engine light but when I brought it back home the Victron app suddenly showed that instead of producing the normal 1.5kwh of power a day, it was only producing 1-2wh a day. Even with nothing running, I would typically produce 10-20 wh a day. After two weeks of having everything completely off, I broke out the multimeter and began reading everything. The Victron app is showing my charge as being in the float state but my multimeter is reading the batteries as only 12.2v with solar collecting 35-36 pv and sending 13.7v to the battery. i turned on the fridge to see what about my battery power and it dropped to 12.1v with the Victron box remaining in the float state. I then turned on the truck and began charging the batteries through the truck batteries and raised the batteries to read at 12.9v however with the fridge running, after about 30 minutes, the batteries were back down reading at 12.4v. Still the Victron box is indicating the float state of charge.
Has anyone else had this issue or can tell me if it is the batteries that need replacing (I have two 350amh batteries connected to be 700amh at 12v) or if the Victron box is the issue? Possibly the box thinking it is in float state means it is not delivering any voltage to the batteries so they are depleted. Or the batteries need to be replaced because they can’t hold a charge.
This all started when I dropped my truck off for a check engine light. I left it at the shop for 3 days during which time they may have had it inside and outside since it shows it made some solar those days. I’m worried maybe it was inside too long so the batteries might have died and now they don’t make their full potential anymore. Or possibly the shop flipped a switch or a wire they didn’t mean to touch. When I asked, they didn’t recall hitting anything unrelated to the check engine light but I wasn’t there so anything could have happened over the 3 days. The Batteries are expensive so I’m hoping to fix other things before replacing the batteries.
