Tag Archives: Euro6 Engines

Euro 6 Engines, Smart Alternators and Your Leisure Battery…

27 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by in Caravan Electrics, Electrical, Technical, tow vehicle, Uncategorized

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About 12 months ago I wrote a blog post “Is A Euro 6 Engine Killing Your Leisure Battery?” and it got a few comments and generated a number of emails. However 12 months on I’m getting a lot more questions relating to problems around smart alternators and I’ve brought forward this blog post by quite a few months from my planned posting date following a couple of long email exchanges with two readers and a few others.

Right, I think the best way to explain this is to set the stage so to speak.

Bob stores his brand new caravan at home and it is regularly plugged in to the house to run the internal battery charger and a dehumidifier. It’s got a new 110Ah AGM leisure battery and a new motor-mover fitted. The caravan is plugged in at least 24 hours before any trip to get the fridge down to temp prior to stocking it up. Bob also has a brand new car, Euro 6 diesel with a smart alternator. The car is a few months younger than the caravan and he’s never towed a caravan with this car. The tow bar and tow electrics were all fitted by the dealer (or dealers agents) prior to it being purchased. He did tow this caravan on 4 trips with his previous car, same make but 6 years older.

The caravan suitably prepped, fridge down to temperature and stocked. An early morning departure and six hour journey with a couple of stops to catch the Euro Shuttle over to France followed by a couple of hours driving in France to their first destination. On arriving, Bob sited the caravan on to the pitch not using the motor-mover and went about setting up. Mrs Bob knowing a request for a cup of tea was imminent went inside to put the kettle on where she discovered everything in the freezer had defrosted. Bob checked the fridge, it was still set for travelling. For what ever reason he also checked the leisure battery on the caravan’s system… 12.1 volts.

Over the next few days there was a couple of phone calls to their caravan dealer along with a number of emails. For the next three weeks and 2 other camp sites the fridge worked perfectly. On the return trip a similar distance and travelling time to the outward journey ended up when Bob returned home he only managed to get the caravan part way up the drive using the motor mover. He had to plug the caravan into his house overnight to charge the leisure battery enough to allow him to use the motor mover to finally put the caravan into its ‘home’ at the rear of the house.

Within a couple of weeks the caravan was returned to the dealer for extensive checking and the dealer could not find any issues with it or the fridge. They put forward the idea it must be an issue with the car. Bob tended to agree with this as he had taken this caravan on four trips towing with is old car and never had any issues. Three relatively short trips, the other a longer two week trip from the North East down to Cornwall, a similar 8 or 9 hour journey and everything seemed fine.

After a conversation with the main dealer who agreed to have the vehicle towing electrics checked over the next couple of days. The verdict from the main dealer was they could find nothing wrong with the vehicle, everything was working as expected.

Now, this is where I got involved. The above is actually an amalgamation of two very similar emails asking for thoughts and advice. The people involved had vehicles from different manufacturers and the caravans were also from different manufacturers. The only common element was the vehicles were new and had Euro 6 engines with smart alternators. I am not going to mention the vehicle or caravan manufacturers for a couple of reasons…. one, I don’t want to end up on the wrong end of a legal letter and two, I don’t actually think the manufacturer of either is relevant.

What’s Going On?

Luckily for me Bob is recently retired but knows his way round an AVO 8 being an apprentice TV repair man for Redifusion back in the day when valves were king. (Just as an aside, I bought my first AVO 8 back in 1976 and paid £8 for it. It was Ex REME in a leather case. I purchased it from MAZEL RADIO on London Rd in Manchester. Anyone from Manchester of a certain age will know Mazel Radio).

To cut a long story short over a period of a couple of weeks we proved that when hitched up, as soon as the smart alternator went into eco mode, there was a current flow up to about 4.5 to 5 amps FROM the leisure battery TO the car. This only stopped and reversed when the electrical load in the car caused the vehicles ECU to turn on the alternator’s output. Furthermore we determined that with the caravan hitched up, the period the alternator was in eco mode was also longer than when unhitched. Although we could not prove this with definitive evidence, this would also support the reverse current flow from the caravan to the vehicle that we were seeing as the caravan leisure battery was now supporting the vehicle battery.

Now there were a few questions that were buzzing round my brain….

  • Why didn’t the caravan habitation relay drop out when the smart alternator went into eco mode to stop this reverse flow?
  • Why didn’t the dedicated tow electrics strop this reverse flow?
  • Why didn’t the vehicle ECU knowing a trailer was hitched stop the alternator going into ECO mode?
  • If the ECU put the alternator into eco mode why didn’t it drop the fridge supply and by default release the habitation relay?
  • Why did the fridge defrost/not work even though in theory there was a voltage supplied to it?
  • Was this the reason I had seen an increase in emails relating to motor mover issues and batteries not holding their charge?

What Next?

I don’t really know. I don’t know how wide spread an issue it is or its going to become. I also don’t know the details of how specific manufacturers implement eco modes in the ECU programming or how the tow bar electrical interface manufacturers could work round the potential issues while still being able to get their products certified by vehicle manufacturers.

I think it might be down to the caravan manufacturers to come up with a solution. I know that there are a couple of after-market products available that provide a solution – We have one I installed in our caravan and in the short term I think this will be the quickest route. Caravan manufacturers may have a reluctance to respond and they can legitimately say “Well it is designed to work correctly to the relevant standards.” I think that maybe it will require the two main caravan clubs to look further into this and if what I have outlined above is proven by them to be the case, bring pressure to bear on all the parties concerned to come up with a way forward to resolve the issue.

For my part, I have contacted a few manufacturers asking for information and clarification or even acknowledgement of an issue. Unfortunately no one seems to want to talk about it. I do know individuals have emails details of their own problem to manufacturers and have received less than helpful responses.

Let me know in the comments below if you have had anything that might be related to this. I’d like to find out more.

EDIT:…

The thought just crossed my mind…. what affect, if any, will this have on AL-KO ATC (if fitted) when the vehicle is in eco mode and the alternator shut down? Does is mean that there is a possibility that the AK-KO ATC may not work correctly in all circumstances?

Getting All Charged Up – Part 1…

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Boondocking, Caravan Electrics, Caravan Servicing, Electrical, Gadgets, General, Maintenance, Modifications, Off Grid, Product Review, Reviews, Technical, tow vehicle, Uncategorized, VW Amarok

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If you are a regular reader you may remember a couple of posts I wrote about leisure battery charging in caravans and motorhomes (Smart Alternators: how they affect Caravans and Motorhomes…. and NEC Show Roundup – it’s all technical…) and I linked to a few videos that Charles Sterling from Sterling Power has produced covering charging topics and Euro6 engines. At the recent NEC show Sterling Power were featuring a new product that would soon be available that would solve all the issues for caravan owners that were experiancing towing with vehicles that had “smart alternators” which were are standard on Euro5 and Euro6 engines and the issues around regenerative braking on Euro6 engines. Charles promised to send me one of the first pre-production “Wildside” Battery to Battery chargers specifically designed for caravans.

IMG_1127A couple of days ago I was excited to receive   a package from Sterling Power containing one of the pre-production new “Wildside” units. The unit itself is robustly constructed and weighs in at about the same as a bag of sugar – 1Kg.

It comes with a comprehensive 11 page instruction/installation manual that goes through all the steps that you need to install the units and what all the various lights and connections are on the unit itself. For anyone that is familiar with my electrical drawings, Sterling have based their installation drawings on my format so are easy to understand (in my opinion!).

I’ll state now for the record, Sterling Power have sent me this free of charge to install and evaluate and that is what I’m going to do, but I will be honest and tell you if I think there are any issues with the installation or the unit in the way that it operates.

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Looking at the connections for the unit it all looks straight forward. The circuit board is labelled  exactly as the drawings in the installation manual which is reassuring and the manual goes into the various functions of each connection and the programming of the unit.

Why this unit?

Since we had changed from using our 2006 Land Rover Freelander HSE as our primary tow vehicle to our 2016 VW Amarok Atacama I had noticed that our leisure battery was not getting close to a full charge even after towing for a couple of hours. We don’t have a solar charging system installed and relied on the tow vehicle and EHU when on site to keep our leisure battery topped up. I knew about the limitations of smart alternators and have written about them before and answered lots of emails about problems readers were now experiancing. Up to this point I really didn’t have an answer to most of the problems and I was considering going down the same route as our Australian cousins and installing some hefty cables between the tow vehicle and caravan, connected together with Anderson connectors. Works fine down under and would do here, especially coupled with one of Sterling Power’s B2B units which I had been looking at.

Now this would be ideal for us, but anyone who tows using a company car, a lease vehicle or a vehicle on a LP scheme can’t just go ahead and install stuff willy nilly. Unless it is done right, it has the potential to be a bit of a ticking bomb as well and  if I was going to recommend it as a solution there are very few people with experience to do an installation of this type. I have seen some right botch jobs on heavy-duty cabling by so-called “professionals” when installing simple winches and dual battery systems on 4 x 4 off road vehicles. Using a lump hammer, cold chisel and block of metal is NOT the professional way to crimp battery cables!

I was looking round to see if there were other options and talking to the chaps on the Sterling Power stand at the show told me they had a product in development that might just be the solution…. and here we are!

How does it work?

I’m not going to give you chapter and verse on the internals (some of that would be guessing on my part and some is propriety information anyway) so I’ll simplify it as much as I can.

In current tow vehicles you have two connections that supply power to the caravan – one for the fridge which is only live when the engine runs and one for charging the leisure battery which is usually live all the time.  Now the problem is that as it’s quite a distance from the front of the vehicle where the battery and alternator are to where  the leisure battery and fridge are located in the caravan. The size of the cables providing the connections are key to how efficient it all works.

Nearly all good quality tow bar wiring uses 2.5 mm square (2.5mm²) cable for these circuits and they connect between the tow vehicle and caravan through a 13 pin plug and socket (or 12N & 12S in older vehicles). The problem with all this is down to good electrical ‘laws’. In essence the more current you draw through a length of cable the greater the voltage drop ( I go into a bit of techie detail about it here… Understanding Cable and Cable Sizes ) Some people go to the lengths of re-wiring the circuits in 4mm² or even 6mm² cable, which was OK up to a point… usually the point which is the connection between the vehicle and caravan. With the traditional installation what you end up with is two circuits that the voltage is usually too low to provide a good charging capability for the leisure battery and the fridge circuit that might or might not, depending on voltage drop, have some spare capacity but you can’t use it to charge the leisure battery.

Back to the Wildside unit…

What the Wildside unit does and this is really clever, is it takes over the two power circuits, aggregates them and manages the output. It draws the maximum current available through each of the two circuits and provides an output for the fridge always at the correct voltage to maximise the efficiency of your fridge and protect it from the voltage fluctuations inherent with Euro6 and Regen engines and any spare capacity on this circuit it added to the leisure battery charging circuit, steps up the voltage and provides a separate output via a four stage intelligent battery charger to maximise the charging capability to your leisure battery.

This is a very very simple one paragraph explanation, it does have a few other tricks up its sleeve though.

One feature is the “Remote Mode Select” switch option. This allows you to install a switch that will allow you to turn the unit to “Wildside”, “Boondocking” or “Off Grid” mode and run the fridge as though it was being powered from the vehicle. It is actually being powered from the leisure battery.

Take note though… Most caravans and motorhomes are fitted with absorption fridges which use a heated element that is constantly on to make the fridge work. However some motorhomes ( I don’t know of any caravans) are fitted with the more expensive and vastly more efficient compressor fridges which work exactly like your fridge at home but can’t run on gas. If you are camping off grid for a few days with an absorption fridge, then run it on gas. However if you are worried about your fridge not maintaining temperature on an hours ferry crossing or on a euro tunnel crossing then you can use the switch to keep the fridge running. The period you can power it will depend on the capacity of your battery(s)… I would not advise using it with and absorption fridge on a battery bank with anything less than 110Ah capacity.

If you do use this feature on the Wildside unit, it will protect your battery bank from discharging past the safe point by turning off the fridge when the voltage reduces and reaches a critical point that would damage your battries.

You also have the ability to specifically select the type of leisure battries you have installed – GEL I, GEL II, AGM I, AGM II, Sealed, Open, Calcium, LiFePO4 to get the correct tailored charging and maintenance program for your battery bank.

If you are fortunate to have lithium leisure batteries there are a couple of other connections you will need to check out too.

Installation Considerations…

We know what it does so how do we connect it. Well this is where it could get messy unless we have a plan.

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In essence, what do we need to do? Well we have to cut and divert the incoming pin 9 and pin 10 into the Wildside unit and connect one output to the leisure battery. We also need to disconnect the fridge from the caravan’s original control box and reconnect it to the Wildside unit. As the habitation relay is usually buried inside the original control box we need to be able to control this from the Wildside unit. There is a terminal for this (“CVan Dis Output”) but what do we connect to this to make the habitation relay operate correctly?

The original Pin 10 lead that we cut and diverted into the Wildside unit, the other end of this still goes into the installed control box and this will operate the habitation relay. Remember we disconnected the fridge power lead from the installed control box and reconnected it directly to the FRG+ output on the Wildside unit so all it does now is operate the habitation relay.

So summing up, we have to cut 3 cables and re-terminate 5 ends into the Wildside unit. This of course does not include the neutral connections which will be easy and straight forward.

Other Considerations…

The installation of the Wildside unit must be easily reversible so it can be moved to another caravan at some point in the future.

We must also use the correct size cables to connect to the leisure battery as we will now be charging at higher currents than was possible before, the original cable that was installed in the caravan to connect to the leisure battery may not be of a sufficient rating.

We must document the changes properly so that at some point in the future someone can follow what we have done incase they have to fault find.

We must make sure all the connections and general installation are done to a high standard to ensure the installation is safe.

Finally we must be able to do the install without invalidating any warranty on the original installed control unit (i.e. not opening it up) and retain functionality of all the elements of the caravans electrical system. It’s no use installing the Wildside unit if half the electrical features of you caravan don’t work afterwards!

IMG_1130In Part 2…

In the next part I’ll go through the manufacturers electrical schematics of the caravan and show how to find and trace  which cables we are going to look for when we do the install and how we produce a simple drawing showing the changes.

I’ll also come up with a quick check list for all the additional bits (cable, terminals etc) that we will need for the install.