Dry camping with one 12 volt battery.

tenbear wrote:
The refrig and various detectors in my MH use about 18AH in 24 hours. Depending on your battery, it could have a capacity in the 100AH range. A rule of thumb says you should not discharge your battery beyond the 50% point so that would give you 50AH available. That would give you 2.77 days.

If you have a bigger battery, or choose to discharge it beyond 50%, you could go a longer time.

Confirmed. We have a Norcold 8 cuft. Left trailer with fridge on, plus Lp alarm etc only, ambient temps 80F day/60F night (approx.) four and a half days, down 75AH on the Trimetric.

Comes to 17 AH/day.

The propane burner sprayer is the culprit Takes 0.5amps when burning, so it is all down to time on in 24 hrs how may AH that is. You can do the math to see how much time in 24hrs ours was on to get that 17AH figure. ("The easy solution is left to the student") :)

Add another batt. You'll be glad you did.

When using just the fridge (and maybe some water pump use) you should be able to go a couple of weeks but you should know that every RV will be different as they have FAR different draw on batteries with NOTHING running. Keep in mind that if you routinely discharge your "marine/RV" (read starting) battery it will give up and die quite quickly. Give it a CHANCE to hang in there for maybe a year, by not discharging greater than 50%.
Good luck / Skip

The refrig and various detectors in my MH use about 18AH in 24 hours. Depending on your battery, it could have a capacity in the 100AH range. A rule of thumb says you should not discharge your battery beyond the 50% point so that would give you 50AH available. That would give you 2.77 days.

If you have a bigger battery, or choose to discharge it beyond 50%, you could go a longer time.

If the fridge is a LP gas model, most likely yes. If it is actually using the 12 volts to do the actual cooling (as opposed to running the control board), no.

To make life easier, I'd go in and start replacing light bulbs with LEDs. Of course, picking up Sylvania "light flutes" (they take 3 AAA batteries), and using those will help things as well.

Of course, upgrading the battery can't hurt.

We left our refrigerator on while we went on a 7 night cruise we have only 1 battery sorry not sure of exact
size. When we got back on Sunday the battery was almost completely dead and the refer was starting to
thaw. Had to use a back up generator to charge TH battery in order to start the TH generator. We did save
all the food but would not try leaving it again for 7 days.

If you go to bed with the chickens and reserve the reefer as the battery's only load, it will last several days. Today's RV's with automatic this, and sparking that, is harder to establish a diet with.

Yup thats when you have a couple of solar panels and a controller come in nice...

Mike C.

if you aren't using the furnace at all, you could easily do 3-4 days using just lights/water pump/fridge/WH.
any furnace usage will cut that down in half.
in fact, one night of furnace usage can easily deplete one battery.

The standard draw on most newer RV's is about 800 mA per hour. This includes the fridge control panel, CO detector and so on. On a stock battery they usually run about 75 amps which means you can run them down to 40% of that. Any lower can do damage to the battery and limit the longevity of it. This means that you get a total of 45 amps which equates to 56 hours of run time. This calculation excludes the furnace, water pump or any lights that you have running.

For a weekend? No problem.

Ryan