Orion 12/12-30 DC-DC Charger DRAWS from Leisure Battery

Q&A and troubleshooting
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1

I have an Orion 12/12-30 DC-DC non-isolated charger hooked up to my old Toyota Motorhome.

I’m monitoring my leisure battery with a Victron Smart shunt. The system all works as expected except for the Orion DC charger.

With the engine running and the Orion unit turned OFF - The Victron App shows the that the Orion unit is receiving 14.5v from the alternator/starter battery. When I turn the Orion unit ON and it starts “bulk charging” the alternator voltage drops to 13.5 and my smart shunt shows a 5amp DRAW on my leisure battery. I’ve left it running for about 30 minutes at a time and the unit barely gets warm to the touch and appears to just be drawing from my battery.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? I’ve triple checked my grounding points and even tied my leisure and starter batteries negative terminals together via jumper cables and achieved the same results.

I have one more thing to try that was suggested to me from someone on Reddit and that is to remove the remote switch I wired up (which seems to be working fine) and replace it with the OEM jumper. I’m going to give that a try this afternoon but I’m out of ideas after that.

I’ve also heard that I might be wasting my time even trying to fix this inefficient unit… Would love to hear thoughts because I’m stumped.

Thanks.

3

I have all of my grounds (mppt, ip65 smart charger, 12v fuse panel, etc.) tied to a grounding terminal which is connected to the “load side” of my Smart Shunt.

On the “battery side” of my Smart Shunt, I have my battery connected and also a cable going down and tying to my steel chassis.

I have my start battery grounded to the chassis as well and that appears to be good.

Is my chassis ground on the leisure battery supposed to be connected to the “load” or “battery” side of my shunt? I thought it was the battery side but I just read something to the contrary on another thread. Everything is the system seems to works great except the Orion DC charger…

5

That was my issue!

I swapped my shunt-to-chassis ground to the “load” side of the shunt, rather than the “battery” side and I’m getting 20Amps of charge while idling.

I would have never guessed that could be my issue. I can understand why my shunt would be giving false readings with the DC charger turned on, but I don’t understand why the DC charger wasn’t still working. It never got hot before or moved my battery charge in any noticeable direction.

Does the shunt communicate with the DC charger somehow?

Anyways, thanks so much for the help and hopefully this can help others.