Dry camping battery bank expectations

DrewE wrote:
A modern residential fridge uses somewhere in the general vicinity of 1 kWh per day, perhaps a little more. A single 6V golf cart battery store around 1.3 kWh of energy, of which around half is usable. A little rough arithmetic suggests that around three days would be a not unreasonable rough expectation. Anything more precise would require measuring the power requirements of your particular setup.

An accurate reply for just the refer but you cannot turn everything else off that uses 12v power. My 21cuft refer uses 96 total watts when running on a PSW inverter if I turn the ice maker off and it runs a little less than half the time... 1.0 kWH as estimated above. You will have 2-4 amps of parasitic load 24/7 in a big MH that you cannot get rid of. Add some lights, water pump, TV and charging phones you are better off running the generator any time you use the microwave or coffee maker... one hour per day should be enough to keep the batteries up assuming a 100 amp charger.

You can easily go an entire night while you sleep as you really won't be using anything else (minimal anyway). If you truly run little or nothing else you can go much longer. How often you open the fridge will also make a difference in the length of time of batteries will last.

A modern residential fridge uses somewhere in the general vicinity of 1 kWh per day, perhaps a little more. A single 6V golf cart battery store around 1.3 kWh of energy, of which around half is usable. A little rough arithmetic suggests that around three days would be a not unreasonable rough expectation. Anything more precise would require measuring the power requirements of your particular setup.

No one can answer that question because it's totally dependent upon your total battery draw and other factors like amount of battery recharge, temperature, etc.

Hopefully at least overnight would be OK.

Adding a battery monitor would be a major step in determining your loads and battery charge.

BTW, when I had concerns on how long I could dry camp, I hooked up my cheapo volt meter to amps on the batteries and read the draw for each appliance. Told me a lot.