Thor Forums

[Lcampbell109]

I know there are tons of posts about battery stuff but I'm a little lost on what parts of those posts might apply to my problem. So I'd like to talk about what's going on and maybe someone can help?

We've had our rig a few years and everything initially worked fine even when dry camping and we did not have our vehicle plugged into shore power when it was sitting in the driveway. We usually took it out about once a month.
Last year, our chassis battery went dead. We replaced it and the vehicle sat in the driveway for probably about a month. Next time we go to leave and the battery is dead, so we jumped it and on our way.
This happened a few times and so we installed a battery cutoff switch on the
chassis battery so that when it was parked we could just turn that knob and it would be fine next time we wanted to leave without having to jump it.

Then we started noticing that our lights in the cabin were dim and wouldn't really last very long unless we were camping with hookup.
The coach battery started having a sulfury smell the last 2 times we were out and died shortly thereafter. That was a 2015 battery. We replaced that with a new one a couple of weeks ago. My husband tested it recently and that new battery is already dead.

We think we tested the converter (when plugged into shore power it was reading around 12 v I think).

We noticed that one time when we parked it, the ignition switch was touchy and easy to pull the key out in the on position, so we replaced the ignition switch. We thought that might be the drain on the chassis battery, and didn't use the cutoff switch for a few days to see, but sure enough it wasn't because the chassis battery died, so back to using our cutoff switch.

We aren't exactly vehicle/electrical gurus but my husband can fix a lot of things so hoping someone has an idea about where to start again on trying to diagnose the problem.
I see many posts about the battery/breaker near the entrance door, but I don't think our vehicle has that? or if it does I don't know where it is.

Only other thing to mention is that we replaced the radio/stereo before the chassis battery started dying. We think we tested that at the time though and it didn't seem significant.

I can deal with using the cutoff switch on the chassis battery, but it's a real bummer to have a dead coach battery and not be able to camp unless we have hookup.
thanks a bunch for any advice you can give!