Help sizing battery chargers
When installing a mains hook up and leisure battery into the same conversion, it's a great idea to have a mains to leisure battery charger. These should be an automatic, intelligent "fit and forget" unit which you can leave plugged in and out of the way somewhere.
As soon as you hook up to the mains, it will kick in and charge your leisure battery, going into "float" mode when the battery is full.
The mains charger is a reasonably simple and inexpensive addition to a conversion we would highly recommend. There is a couple of different options regarding the sizing of the charger.
As a general rule, you want to aim for between 5-10% of your total leisure battery size in Amp hours (Ah).
For example an 8A leisure battery charger is fine to charge a battery bank of between 80-160Ah and our 20A charger is perfect for charging battery banks from 200-400Ah. This isn't a hard and fast rule whereby a charger won't work if you're slightly outside of these parameters, but it's worth sticking as close as possible. (it's also worth noting that lithium batteries have a different calculation to this).
Another factor to consider when sizing your battery charger is will there be any other charge going into the leisure battery at the same time. e.g. split chargers or solar. If so, you can use a slightly smaller charger. If all of your chargers are intelligent, they will work together nicely, with the most powerful taking precedent.
If you need help deciding on a combination of mains/solar/split charging or sizing chargers to suit other battery banks, please let us know as we have an extensive range of chargers we can offer.