Over winter Electric hook up

Does anyone here leave their van on EHU over the winter peroid or for long spells at a time. I know on the Sargent control units you can turn of the charging circuit so its not running all the time.
Reason I ask this was because we have a small frost heater inside the van and couldnt make up our minds whether to keep the sargent unit powered up all the time as you can hear some transformer noise from it or just to run a properly tripped extension lead into the van and run the heater directly from that. Once ever week or so then just put the hook up on to keep the batterys topped up.

During periods of cold weather I put mine on EHU for days or weeks at a time, and my power control unit is nowhere near as sophisticated as the current Sargent ones.

I'd have no worries at all about leaving the Sargent controller powered up all the time. It will obviously cost a small amount to run, but I doubt that would amount to much.

We leave the van plugged in but use a small heater every now and again so the van doesnt get damp, but we do use the van all year so that helps

Hi Robbie
I'm sure most of the forum members have their own ways of heating up the van during cold spells.
I use my van at least once a week on away days, if its to bad to drive out, I hook up and put on a small oil filled heater, keeps the van around 4%.

Boaby

We leave our Nuevo on hook up when on the drive pretty much all the time and have suffered no ill effects....

For the first 2 or 3 months when we first got our Nuevo we just used to plug it in every few weeks but had problems with the control panel rebooting and shutting down (as some will remember from posts elsewhere on the forum) which seems like it was down to the battery voltage dropping as a result of not being charged enough.

With the 3 stage chargers like the Bonus and Sargent units fitted to Auto-Sleepers I understand it's perfectly OK to leave them connected as the voltage reduces to a trickle depending on how depleted the battery is... also with the van on hook up, we now tend to leave the Truma heater switched on low at the thermostat when cold / freezing conditions are forecast so it kicks in to take the chill off the van.

CC

Thats grand, happy enough to leave it hooked up in that case. We have a 55w heater which has its own thermostat and over protection plugged in the van so it will come on and off as the internal temp changes. Its enough to just keep the temp right but not powerfull enough to raise the tempreture to much to fast to cause condensation. Left a couple of dry gbags in there as well, blinds pulled and have a silver screen fitted to the outside of the front windows
The Charge switch on the Sargent unit can be switched on for a day or so a week and left of the rest of the time.

We will be using the van all year but want it kept right just when sitting in the yard

We use a 1/2kw oil filled electric radiator in our van over the winter for the same reason as you, but we don't have the Sargant turned on unless we need to charge the batteries.

I think long term i'll just have the heater on its own supply and connect the main EHU on once a week or so to keep the batteries spot on