backchannel: draining the starter AND house batteries

What to do when both starter and leisure batteries are dead?

I would start by asking how did I get here? I am posting this backchannel because the poster is 1/0¹ and I don’t have a lot of faith in their ability to take on the information.

I have a dc-dc charger now but again that relies on keeping some charge in your starter battery and also I think that too depends on the leisure battery having some charge to work.

DC-DC chargers typically take their power from the starter battery.

I do have a jump starter power pack

In the original scenario one could

1. use the jump pack to put enough voltage on the leisure battery to start the solar charge controller
2. wait until the leisure battery is charged
3. charge the starter battery off the leisure battery (self-jumpstarting)
4. start the engine

If the new DC-DC maintains the starter battery a similar thing could be done, although step 3 would be a bit different. The jump pack would be used to put enough power in the starter to bring the DC-DC online so it could charge the starter batt.

1. a new Reddit account with 1/0 karma. ↩