All right folks, I think we can say that Rae’s battery bank and whole house inverter set up is operating at full capacity!!! I’m sitting in partial sun with about 12.8V only on all the various monitors and I am not only charging my laptop, but also using it! The inverter does beep when the clouds get really heavy, but just for a second! I still think the DC charger I’m getting tomorrow is my best solution, but I feel soooooooo much better than I did yesterday!
I really want to thank everyone who has given me input on my battery upgrade woes. Every single comment I’ve gotten has given me just a little insight into why things weren’t working correctly, how to fix it, what to expect in terms of performance, etc. I really had all the knowledge I needed and the right tools. The problem was with the execution. Make good connections, folks!
Croft asked me how long I plan to stay here and what my plan is if the weather goes bad. I was able to go 13 days on my old batteries with fewer amp hours in mostly crappy cold super overcast conditions. Right now, I’ve got the rig plugged into the whole house inverter and am running the fridge and charging the computer, for a total of 2.8 amps going out. I have 0.9 amps coming in. My monitor is telling me I could run like this for another 43 hours before depleting my batteries. When I was just running a light last night, I could have kept going for 150 hours before depleting my batteries.
So I have a lot of reserve capacity for cloudy days, especially since I don’t have to run the furnace. I suspect I will run out of water and holding tank space before I run out of power. I can haul water from the icky public bathroom and dump grey water there and I can go about six weeks on my black tank. So unless the weather goes really, really bad, I should be able to last four weeks here as I had hoped to do.
This experiment is going to serve me well since I’ve decided I’d rather not put much money into my property next summer. So I’ll leave here knowing if I stand a chance of lasting the summer without plugging in.
You probably already did this, but just in case, don’t forget to connect to your 20 lb propane to keep your in house as reserve. Brat. I’d swim in my right next to me beach too if it didn’t have ice on it!! 😛 BTW, post pending in the next day or so. Drama queen has more chapters……
I’m consuming propane at summer rates so I can go three or four months with what I’ve got on board!
Looking forward to more posts from you!!!
“Right now, I’ve got the rig plugged into the whole house inverter and am running the fridge and charging the computer, for a total of 2.8 amps going out.”
Ah, but that reading isn’t giving you the whole picture. A typical 6-7 cubic foot RV refrigerator draws about 350 watts when running on 120 VAC. If that AC is coming from an inverter, then when the fridge is cooling, it’s pulling more than 30 amps at 12 volts from your battery bank.
Now, you may not see that drain when you glance at the battery monitor, because the refrigerator isn’t drawing power all the time–its thermostat switches it on and off. Nevertheless, even if it’s only on half the time, that’s 15 amps on average, 24 hours a day.
24 hours times 15 amps is 360 amp-hours a day. Your solar panels aren’t able to replace that amount of energy. (Heck, I have 500 watts of panels, but even they can’t sustain that load–I know from experience last summer, when I had to run the fridge on electricity because its propane burner wouldn’t stay lit, due to a bad thermocouple. The batteries–I have 525 amp-hours worth–were nearly drained overnight.)
So if you find your batteries being rapidly depleted and wonder why, this is why: you didn’t happen to be looking at the monitor when it was showing the fridge drawing 30+ amps, so you were mislead about your power consumption. That’s why you should switch the refrigerator over to propane when boondocking… unless you have a kilowatt or more of solar panels on the roof, that is. 🙂
Augh, again, I don’t run my fridge on AC when I’m boondocking. 🙂 It’s running on propane with just a little battery juice.
My monitor says that since I last got a full charge (noon yesterday; today was cloudy and I was using quite a bit of power), I’ve only used up 20A. I could go like this forever. 🙂
Sorry– I misinterpreted your statement “I’ve got the rig plugged into the whole house inverter and am running the fridge and charging the computer”. OK, good. 🙂
But that’s for that info, it’s good for my readers to know! 😀