Lithium - Charging
Picked up a couple 12v 100amp-hr Lithium batteries off amazon ($150 each delivered including bluetooth monitoring). My charger has a lithium setting and I have 240w of solar. I've had them installe...
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No problem there. It's a 35amp charger and 240w of solar, so even if both are maxed out that's just slightly over 0.25C on a 200amp-hr battery bank.
Mostly upgraded for the 12v fridge which was marginal on a single 12v 100amp-hr lead acid making it thru the night. Now I'm estimating I should be good for 2-3 days even if the solar isn't putting out much. If the solar is producing, it should be good pretty much indefinitely.
does your 240 watts of solar recover the overnight usage and power the fridge during the day? I have 325 watts on my truck camper and I am thinking of upgrading that and putting an inverter in.
On sunny days it seems to but not on overcast days...only had the battery upgrade for 2 weeks.
ok, I am just trying to get a mental picture of how much solar a compressor fridge will need as I have never had one, but if I need to replace the fridge in my camper or buy a new one I don't want my options limited by that if I can help it.
ya overcast days are the worst, but that's why I build my systems a little different than the norm. I will figure out my overnight usage and my total daily usage and I size the solar to have the overnight usage replaced by around noon. then for battery size I take my total daily usage and multiply it by the number of days of my "average" trip. that way if I am camping and something breaks in the solar I don't have to go home early, and the other side is if I have a few very bad solar days (raining and overcast) as soon as a sunny day comes I make up about 2 or 3 days capacity every day. this is pretty easy for me to do as opposed to someone who has to run AC as I have only had 1 day in the last 40 years of camping I wish I could run an AC with no hookups.
When running, it pulls about 50w, so worst case is about 1kwh permday but usually closer to a 50% duty cycle.
We will have to see how long it holds up long term but love that for the same cabinet size, we get about 50% more storage space inside.
The solar came with the rig and we do have a portable generator so if we do get multiple overcast days, we can always run the generator for a couple hours to top up.
