[also see self-jumpstarting]

maintaining starter batteries

There are dedicated maintainers:

Experimental: RV With Tito has uses a PWM solar charge controller to maintain starter battery from the house bank.

Also see the subarticle on combiner gotchas.

starter battery chargers alongside DC-DC chargers

If a DC-DC is present and relatively weak shore power charging is applied to the starter battery there are circumstances where the DC-DC can cycle on-off constantly. Let's consider a 20A DC-DC and a 10A starter battery maintainer.

  1. starter battery at 12.7v before charging applied
  2. starter battery voltage rises from 10A charging
  3. DC-DC sees >13.4v and starts pulling ~22A to charge house battery at 20A
  4. starter battery drops to 12.6v and DC-DC charger stops
  5. repeat forever

To avoid this scenario either:

1)
for DC-DC models with starter battery maintenance, see above