If you’ve been camping before, or even wandered into your favourite camping store, then no doubt you will have seen the seemingly endless amount of camping electrical gear you can use to improve your camping experience. Things like camping fridges, LED camp lights, and even pure sinewave inverters that let you run many 240v appliances from home like a coffee machine or a hairdryer are all within the realistic reach of campers these days. However unless you want to stick to a busy, powered caravan park campsite, then you’re going to need a deep cycle battery to power everything, like the AGM Deep cycle batteries we sell here at Adventure Kings.

These deep cycle batteries can power your camping electrical equipment for extended periods of time, and when you add a DC charger to charge your AGM battery while you’re driving or a camping solar panel to keep it topped up while you’re camping, you can camp almost indefinitely!

But with the increase in amazing camping experiences that these bits of camping 12v equipment bring with them, comes an equal increase in the power supply requirements to keep them all running smoothly. You might even find that your deep cycle  battery starts to go flat after 24 hours of running everything, which is where the benefits of running multiple deep cycle camping batteries comes in!

Yep, that’s right – it’s easy to connect two, three or theoretically unlimited amounts of deep cycle batteries together, assuming you do it in the right way. What you want to do is connect them all red (positive) battery terminals together, and all black (negative) battery terminals together, in a connect type known as parallel battery connection. What this does is combine the amperage of all your batteries without increasing the voltage – so if you connect two 12v 100 amp hour deep cycle batteries together in parallel like what is described above, you end up with what is effectively a single 12v 200 amp hour AGM deep cycle battery. That means the ability to run your electrical equipment for even longer without stressing about the sun being hidden behind the clouds, or having to go for a drive to charge your deep cycle batteries back up!

A word of warning though, to ensure that you get the most service life possible out of your camping batteries when you connect them in parallel. Wherever possible, you should spread the charging cables and the discharging cables across all batteries. What does that mean? Let’s first look at how you charge your batteries. You’ve probably got two big cables coming from your dual battery system or your DC Charger, right? A red and a black. With the two batteries connected in parallel like we mentioned a moment ago, the correct way to charge them is to connect the red cable to one battery, and the black cable to the other. This way, the electrical charge is forced to run through both batteries, instead of just running into one battery and hopefully eventually flowing through to the second one.

Likewise with the electrical accessories you power off your deep cycle batteries, you should try and connect them in a similar fashion. The best way to do this is use something like the Kings 12v Control Box as a power distribution hub, and connect the box with the red cable to one battery and the negative cable to the second battery. Then you can connect your camping fridge or LED camp lights to the 12v Control Box and it will draw power from both batteries. This has the effect of evenly drawing power away from both batteries instead of simply sucking juice out of one battery quicker than the other.

Running a pair of deep cycle batteries is an amazing setup that will extend your camping ability so much. More than that, it’ll take the stress out of camping! No longer do you have to worry about getting your camping solar panel out as soon as the sun is out – you’ll have a whole lot more leeway because you’re doubling your electrical amperage reserve.

The sky really is the limit when it comes to running multiple deep cycle batteries for camping – in the past I have setup a pair of 120Ah deep cycle batteries in the back of my 4WD, and also another pair of the same 120Ah AGM Batteries in my camper trailer. With 480Ah of battery power on hand, you can run multiple fridges for days on end and never have to worry about your batteries going flat for a seriously long time!

Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s helpful to think of your deep cycle batteries like your bank account, and the power within them like your money. Sure, you can keep taking money out of the bank, but eventually you’ll have to put money back in. As we all know, you can only safely drain AGM batteries for camping down to 50% of their capacity without risking damaging them, before you need to recharge them. In that scenario above, sure I could drain a whopping 240Ah out of my batteries, but then with my 25A DC Charger I would have had to go drive for at least 8 hours flat to recharge them all again! It’s a small price to pay though for the convenience of being able to run my fridges and camp lights for days on end.

You’ll love how much better your camping experience gets with multiple deep cycle batteries. It’s a genuine camping game-changer, and once you’ve been camping with two or even three AGM batteries powering all your gear, you’ll wonder how you ever went camping without them!