Battery charger electrical advice and help needed - please.

[Adria Haynes]

Gang. Please know going into this thing that I'm well aware that
I'm wordy - but I do so in an effort to be thorough. So please, grab
a soda and get comfy.

I lurk here often and post very little. We are in our 3rd summer
with our 80 BB 35FC and it has been bitter sweet. The payments are
bitter for 12 months a year, and the bus is sweet when we use it for
about 12 days a year.

Anyways, it's getting harder to justify and we have toyed with the
idea of selling it after this past Labor Day weekend, but it gave us
a little "gotcha" when it came time to go home. I don't know if it
was "quitting before we could fire it" or what, but I could use some
help on the problem if/before we put it on the market.

The problem: I think my battery chargers are hosed.

When we bought the bus, the Trojan batteries had been killed by the
PO leaving the fridge set to electrical. We dealt with them not
holding a charge until last summer when I bought 4 new batteries.
Even then, it seemed that even though I'd make sure I had
everythign off - something drained them. I got tired of them being
drained when I'd go out for the monthly "start up and run for awile"
so I decided to just leave the bus plugged in to my garage. That
was fine until my new batteries blew up. I replaced those batteries
with 4 new ones in June and all seemed well through our trip in
July. I was told that my 1980 chargers wouldn't trickle charge, but
were steady pumpers that over charged the batteries. Lesson learned.

When we got home from the July trip, I plugged the bus into the
house again. It took me about 3 weeks to remember, but I unplugged
the chargers too. On this past Friday I went out to fire the old
girl up and she was dead. I plugged in the chargers and Saturday
morning it fired right up. After work on saturday, I went to start
it again and it cranked very slowly, then on the last possible
revolution - she took off and purred like I knew she would and I
took the bus to the campground where my family already was waiting
for me with other family members. I plugged into 30 amp shore power
with the chargers on until Monday afternoon. When I went to start
it to leave, it wouldn't even click. I think I had an anurism.

I found that with the chargers plugged in, the volts meter would
wiggle at 12 until I tried to start it, then it would shake from pin
to pin. It was wierd and I couldn't make any sense of it, but that
isn't saying much either. About all I have ever learned about
electricity is that it hurts when I touch it.

I unplugged the charger and removed the 2 batteries that start the
bus and put each one on an external 6V charger. They both took 4
amps for over 2 hours with no improvement. When I removed the other
2 RV batteries so that I could take all 4 in for testing, the ground
posts on those two had some deformation and melting, which I knew
was bad.

I got ANOTHER 4 new batteries, hooked up the 2 that I needed to make
it run and it fired right up. We got it home and I un hooked those
parallel batteries from one another, the RV ones never did get
hooked up, and the chargers are also unplugged for now.

It seemed to me and everybody else that the charger that was
supposed to be charging the batteries was the very thing that was
screwing everything up. It's the only thing that makes sense to me,
but like I said - I don't know much about these things and my pool
of experience is growing, but still VERY shallow.

Thank you for your time and patience with me thus far. Now that you
have that little bit of history, my questions are as follows:

Does this make sense to anybody else or am I on something that the
chargers are hosed?

Is there a way to check the charging unit that is hard wired into
the bus without unhooking it all?

If it only makes sense to replace this unit, what are my "best
value" options?

Does anybody have a used one that's still good that they'd sell?

Thank you very much for your help,

John, Adria, Blase, Kaleigh, Jade, and Gage.