Anyone else struggling to keep the leisure battery topped up on short winter drives?

Short winter drives are the absolute worst for keeping on top of charge! 🙈

Not on a motorhome myself but I've dealt with similar faff on my narrowboat — engine alternator just doesn't cut it when you're only moving for 20-30 mins and the battery's already low.

A few things that actually helped me:

• DC-DC charger (B2B) — proper game changer. Something like the Victron Orion-Tr Smart means you're pulling charge properly rather than just trickling whatever the alternator feels like giving
• Shore power whenever you can — even a cheap hook-up overnight sorts it
• Check your alternator output — loads of older vans have fairly feeble ones and it's worth knowing what you're actually working with

The other thing people forget in winter is that your battery capacity drops noticeably in the cold anyway, so you're starting from a worse position before you've even turned the engine over. If you've got AGM or especially LiFePO4, worth checking the cold temperature specs.

What battery chemistry are you running? And is this a split charge relay setup or something more sophisticated? Makes a big difference to what options you've got.

Would love to hear what others are doing — especially anyone who's added a small rooftop panel just to offset the winter deficit. Wondering if even 100W makes a meaningful difference when there's barely 6 hours of proper daylight! ☀️

@PanelKate not a motorhome either but I've run into the same issue with my static caravan setup when relying on a vehicle to top up batteries during short trips.

A few questions worth working through methodically:

• What's your alternator output rated at, and is it going through a proper B2B (DC-DC) charger like a Victron Orion-Tr Smart, or just a split-charge relay?
• How large is your leisure bank?

A split-charge relay on a short winter run is largely pointless — the alternator barely gets the starter battery back to a decent state before you've stopped. A B2B charger at least prioritises your leisure bank properly and can squeeze meaningful charge from even a 20-minute run.

Also worth checking: are your connections suffering from voltage drop? Resistance increases in cold temperatures and a marginal setup gets significantly worse.

Slap a Victron SmartSolar on the roof and let the sun do what your alternator clearly can't be bothered with — even UK winter light beats a 20-minute school run for keeping your batteries happy.

@SolarGaz that's my usual fallback too, but winter sun in the UK is genuinely pitiful — I'm in the north and some days my roof panels are producing next to nothing even at midday.

Quick question for anyone who's tackled this properly: has anyone fitted a DC-DC charger (like the Victron Orion-Tr Smart) between the vehicle alternator and the leisure bank? I've been reading that a standard split-charge relay is largely useless with modern smart alternators because the vehicle ECU drops voltage too quickly.

My setup runs a 200Ah Fogstar lithium bank and I'm wondering whether the Orion would actually force a proper charge cycle regardless of what the alternator's doing — or is it still limited by the short run times? What sort of charge rates are people actually seeing on a 20-30 minute drive?

@BevJackson64 I feel that northern winter pain — spent two seasons in my motorhome up near the Lakes and there were whole weeks where the panels were basically decorative.

What finally sorted it for me was pairing a Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 battery with a proper B2B charger rather than relying on a split-charge relay. The difference was genuinely startling — even a 25-minute run to the village was actually doing something meaningful to the state of charge rather than just tickling the top of a flooded lead battery.

The B2B pulls a consistent, controlled current regardless of how lazy the alternator's feeling, which is exactly what short hops need. Victron's Orion-Tr Smart is the one I ended up with after a fair bit of research — not cheap, but it transformed short winter drives from a source of anxiety into something actually useful.