Inverter Help

pianotuna wrote:
Nayther,

There is no point in having more than 150 watts of panels per 100 amp-hours of storage. In your case that would be about 340 watts.

The reason is that at 85% state of charge acceptance rate of the battery bank is 12.5 amps per 100 amp-hours of storage.

225 amp-hours may only support a 1000 watt inverter. Six volt jars exhibit greater voltage drop under load. Larger loads on a 3000 watt may drive the input voltage so low that the inverter cuts out to protect the battery.

Lead acid cells are "happy" up to about 25 amps of load. 25 X 12 = 300 watts. They may support 75 amps or about 900 watts. Anything over that may push them HARD.

If real estate is a problem then if you have deep pockets move to LI jars. It solves the capacity problem, too. Caveat is not using the RV in cold weather.

There is no way I could boondock with a 225 amp-hour battery bank. Mine is 556 and I wish it were 1000 amp-hours.

I second the comment on inverter. With 2 GC I could run my 1000W inverter drawing about 900VA only if the batteries were in the 80% SOC or higher. With 4 GC, I can do it down to 50% SOC.

As a baseline, 1000W draw is around 90A from a 12V battery bank!

And I have very short wiring to the batteries from the inverter with #0 wire. very low cabling drop.

Solve the coffee problem the way we do. Use a teapot to heat water on the stove, DW makes her tea, I use an Areopress for coffee. A french press w/o the mess of cleaning a french press, and great coffee.

If you want/need to draw over 1000VA often you have two choices.

1) use 4GC
2) use 12V deep discharge batteries. they have much lower internal resistance and when paralleled each battery only needs to supply a portion of the total current.

But then for low current draws (25A or less) and dry camping, GC wins.

Now we boondock quite a bit, but have 4 GC and 500W solar. That has been plenty for us, but 2 GC would be an issue.