I’ve been holding steady here these last few grey days, never going below 87% battery capacity. I’ve only used the alternator to get a voltage boost during the day for office-related matters, with the 10A or so I’d get out of it being a nice bonus. The solar has performed beyond all expectations, sucking an average of 4 to 5A out of the swirling dark grey mass above us.<\/p>\n
Last night, the battery monitor claimed that I was at about 93% and down 16.8A. Guess what all my volt metres were telling me? That even with the fridge and a light going, I was between. 12.58 and 12.61V. Which meant that with everything off, I’d be above 12.6V, which is considered a full charge.<\/p>\n
But I knew better because my amp meter is calibrated properly. Without the battery monitor, I would have gone to bed smug and pleased that I got to a full charge last night and would have just run them down today as though I was starting over.<\/p>\n
Imagine if I kept doing that over the lifetime of my batteries, just getting them near, but never at, full charge. That would eventually kill them. With the battery monitor, I know that they need just a little more charging them.<\/p>\n
Voltage readings do matter and have a use; I’ll be doing up a post about that. But I don’t know how anyone can do any serious amount of time off the grid without a battery monitor because they really are the only way to know exactly where you stand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been holding steady here these last few grey days, never going below 87% battery capacity. I’ve only used the alternator to get a voltage boost during the day for office-related matters, with the 10A or so I’d get out of it being a nice bonus. The solar has performed beyond all expectations, sucking an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242,635,5,1039,3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magnolia-beach","category-north-america","category-rving","category-texas","category-travel","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}