Battery charger or generator?

Hi,

I would go with the solar and two inverters. One at 300 watts and one at 2000 watts. I'd buy pure sine wave inverters.

Time to clarify! No I don't want to get naked with anyone! When boondocking I charge by hooking my eu3000 to the 30A "shore power" plug on the 5er. Since I am "plugged" in, I am going through my WFCO 8955P converter. I am just trying to cut down the charge time because I know the sound of gene's in the forest is not appreciated by many (even the low db of the eu3000). Maybe the way to go would be two 250watt solar panels, controller and a 1500 watt inverter? Although the cheapest way might be to add two batteries.

You need a real charger. The generators "charging" output is pathetic at best. Like was mentioned, ANYTHING will be better than that. Is there any reason you're not using the trailer/motorhome/truck campers built in converter???????

If it is 235 amp hours than 70 amps is the slightly rounded proper max charge rate, a Progressive Dynamics 9280 is OK,, (Actually Damon put a 9180 with wizard in mine, basically same as 9280 with dongle) (Basically, no, exactly yes).

Either a 60 or 80 would be good.

The 12 volt side of the generator.. Forget it, not good for much of anything.

sjturbo wrote:
Strange indeed! Crown is 235ahr.

Sorry, missed your typo 325/235 whatever --or was that my typo? Anyway just means you can do much better if you have the amps and get it (a 50-90) done in two hours.

If you're using the 12v direct charger from the 3000, just about *any* charger will do better than that. And no, I won't bare with you.

Strange indeed! Crown is 235ahr.

Monsoon season and cloud cover starts in AZ around June 15th, so it won't be all sunshine every day, that you can count on.

sjturbo wrote:
Regarding solar, would 200 watts be sufficient to keep the batteries charged?

With LED lamps, reasonable conservation and good sun the 200w should be fine. May still need gen just to dry hair and run the microwave. 200w will definitely cut the generator run time.

sjturbo wrote:
Bare with me on this. I just spent 2wks boondocking with my two Crown 325ahr 6v GC batteries. Every 4th day I ran the eu3000 4hrs to recharge up from 12.3V. Would I be better off connecting a battery charger to the gene and hooking direct to the batteries?

You don't say how far up in SOC you got to in that four hours. You don't say how many amps you started out with. You do say it took four days to get down to 60% SOC. That is irrelevant to how long it should take to recharge a normal "50-90."

If you have enough charger (in amps) and enough gen (in watts) to run the charger, you can use about 30% charging rate to advantage. So a 325 bank would take say a 100amp charger no problem for the fast charge.

My Honda 3000 can do 130 amps of Vector chargers before popping its breaker. If I use power-factor corrected chargers in the mix instead, then I can get more charging amps before overloading the Honda.

"Oh dear," people will say, "you will kill those batts!" Nope. I have done this a lot. The batts have their own "natural acceptance rate" they cannot exceed, so they will taper the amps as they wish. You cannot hurt them.

So the answer is you can use additional charging amps to "do better" and reduce gen time. I usually do my four 6s (458AH) from 50-90 in two hours using a 100amp charger. So if you are taking four hours to go from 60-? on a mere 325AH bank, then yes, you can "do better"---way better!!!