Adding another 12 volt battery
My fifth wheeler came with one battery but when we lose power it does not last long for the 12 volt lighting. What harm would I be doing if I added another battery and ran it in series with the other ...
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Another thing you can do is replace the automotive incandescent lights with LEDs,,, They will burn at the same brightness but will draw much less power. You can save around 80% of DC power from your battery just doing this...
It all kinda depends what you want to do when camping. If you want to do alot of OFF-ROAD camping with no hookups then you need to plan out what you want to do when you are camping like this and change around your DC system accordingly.
We camp all the time OFF-GRID and get by just fine with around 255AHs of DC power...
Our concept is to run all the things we want to have on from the battery bank and only allow it to discharge down to its 50% charge state (Around 12.0VDC) by 8AM the next morning. Then when allowed we can fire up the 2KW generator and connect the trailer shore power cable to it and be able to use the on-board converter/charger unit to recharge our battery bank back up to its 90% charge state. This will give almost full performance out of the battery bank again so we can do all of this all over again the next day/night run off the batteries. We can do around 12-14 50% to 90% charge cycles before we have to do a full 100% charge state. This will take us around 12 hours to complete running our 0n-board converter/charger unit with shore power or generator connected. Since this is usually not allowed at camp site to run a generator that long this is when we usually head for the house and it there...
Been doing this idea for us since early 2009 and it works out just fine for us...
If you just want to run some lights over night of course you won't have to do all of this. I imagine once you start camping off the power grid you will fall in love with it and want to be able to run more things off your battery bank...
We do just about everything we would want to do at an Electric site running almost all of the things off of the battery bank with the exception of the High Wattage Air Conditioner and High Wattage Microwave unit. Everything else is fair game..
It is all in the planning...
Roy Ken
It all kinda depends what you want to do when camping. If you want to do alot of OFF-ROAD camping with no hookups then you need to plan out what you want to do when you are camping like this and change around your DC system accordingly.
We camp all the time OFF-GRID and get by just fine with around 255AHs of DC power...
Our concept is to run all the things we want to have on from the battery bank and only allow it to discharge down to its 50% charge state (Around 12.0VDC) by 8AM the next morning. Then when allowed we can fire up the 2KW generator and connect the trailer shore power cable to it and be able to use the on-board converter/charger unit to recharge our battery bank back up to its 90% charge state. This will give almost full performance out of the battery bank again so we can do all of this all over again the next day/night run off the batteries. We can do around 12-14 50% to 90% charge cycles before we have to do a full 100% charge state. This will take us around 12 hours to complete running our 0n-board converter/charger unit with shore power or generator connected. Since this is usually not allowed at camp site to run a generator that long this is when we usually head for the house and it there...
Been doing this idea for us since early 2009 and it works out just fine for us...
If you just want to run some lights over night of course you won't have to do all of this. I imagine once you start camping off the power grid you will fall in love with it and want to be able to run more things off your battery bank...
We do just about everything we would want to do at an Electric site running almost all of the things off of the battery bank with the exception of the High Wattage Air Conditioner and High Wattage Microwave unit. Everything else is fair game..
It is all in the planning...
Roy Ken
