Dry camping recommendations

Golf cart batteries are a good idea.
Run your generator during the day or dry camp with no neighbors and run your gen all you want.
Use LED bulbs, run the furnace when you wake up, minimize tv time. Teach your family to value juice and learn to conserve it.
I dry camp for many days at a time and often use battery operated lantern, headlamps for reading and would never want a TV in an Rv.

garyemunson wrote:
Piano... I think it's set up right. That thing came with a War and Peace size manual. Guess it's just GC-2 time.

I dont know how heavily you invert with things like micro or coffee pots etc. If you want to invert to heavy loads I would consider four GC2 minimum and many on here might suggest AGM. Search Peukert effect on battery discharging. You have a great inverter but absolutely nothing for batteries compared to it. A friend had a professional install with a Magnum $2500 2800 watt inverter/charger and three cheap AGM and 160 watts of solar!!! Duuuhhh.

Two GC2 is a good start and then look at how you are using power. Get leb bulbs, charge laptops, phones while on genny, cook coffee and evening meals on genny. With two gc2 I'd stay away from inverting heavy. My toaster is a smaller 120 load and it pulls 90 amps DC, you cant do that to two GC2, NO way.

Piano... I think it's set up right. That thing came with a War and Peace size manual. Guess it's just GC-2 time.

Thanks, AZ! My inverter/charger is a 2K watt 2015 Magnum which I guess is a pretty good unit capable of maintaining 4 GC-2s. As I've started looking around, there are quite a few things on the Winnebago that are silently stealing 12 volts non-stop. I think I will start by replacing the 12 volt batteries with 2 GC-2s in series and see if that delivers what I want, adding 2 more if necessary. As long as I get through one night, I don't mind running the generator in the daytime to recharge for the next night. Hadn't thought about a small genny just for battery recharging. Great idea!

Have you set up the Magnum charge profile correctly? Have you equalized the battery bank? Are they wired in a balanced manner?

Remember the 10 X rule of thumb. If the wattage being used is 400 it represents a draw of 40 amps on the battery.

Two 12 volt batteries? Are they also group 24 which is the smallest available? Even if they are group 27 they are still minimal and may not carry all that. It's very common to upgrade to four GC2. You also have to look at your charging capabilities.

During my first year I ran a four pack GC2, led bulbs, propane fridge, 42" led tv, lap top, cell phones, ceiling fan and plenty of furnace and I'd usually be down to 12.2 or a little less. I wasn't inverting to heavy devices. Your inverter isn't drawing too much power. It's probably drawing .5 to .7 amps. That's 500 to 700 milli amps 5/10 to 7/10 of an amp. When DW was done watching tv late at night she would shut of the inverter with a remote button which saved about .7 A x 8 hours = 5.6 amp hours.

In order to put all those amp hours back in the next day I had upgraded the converter to a Progressive Dynamics PD 4655 with 14.4 volt capability. Even with a better charging source it will probably take 6 hours or so to put all those amp hours back in. You can do 3 or 4 hour charges and not return 100 % and possibly make it through the next night but each day your battery specific gravity will drop lower and lower.

As the gravity reading drops each day you end up with what amounts to a smaller and smaller battery. You may see 14.4 volts when charging and you may see 12.6 resting but the battery wont perform because it hasn't been fully charged. You also get into the issue of what generator you are charging with. You dont need a 5000 RV installed generator to charge your batteries so people will often times use something smaller and quieter like a Honda or Champion etc inverter.

There is no one size fits all answer to much of this. Everyone accomplishes it in different ways so you need to look at the whole picture and build your system. I accomplished it by setting out to be just as comfortable as when at home and have spent about $5,000 or more from generator to inverter to panels on the roof.

The second year I added 520 watts of solar which would usually have me fully charged each day. For poor solar days I also added a manual power supply which helped the PD4655 and could also be used to equalize. There are better converters available that will go to 14.8 volts so dont buy what I did. If you are always going to charge with a genny then you want to build an efficient system based on that. If you are going to run a decent solar bank then you can put less emphasis on genny charging and live with the RV generator and perhaps the oem converter. The oem converter can some times not be a very good model.

You need to do an energy audit to get some idea of what's going on.
You battery bank is your savings account.
Your overnight use is your withdrawals.
Your charging sources are your income.
While charging you also have to pay extra because of system resistance. If you use 100 amp hours you may need to create about 112 amp hours return.

Everything you are using from your tank monitor or propane sniffer to stereo to satellite are using amperage. That amperage times how long it is drawn equals amp hours. Just letting your rig sit there with the fridge on propane and no lights on or anything is probably pulling 1 to 1.5 amps. 1.5 x 24 hr = 36 amp hours. A group 24 battery is probably 85 amp hours and only about half or less of that amp hour rating are available without discharging too deeply. So one of those batteries is only good for day or so. When people shut off their fridge and leave the rv in storage they will come back to stone dead batteries after a week or two.

I suspect your existing batteries are not up to the task.im guessing they’re also not true deep cycle batteries.

Even if all you have is a pair of deep cycle / starting batteries you should be able to get by for a minimum of a single overnight.

There is however no comparison between typical deep cycle batteries and GC2 golf cart type batteries. It’s not an expensive upgrade and likely no cost if your existing batteries need replacing anyways.