I took the trailer to the dealer a couple months ago, and as most of you suspected, they applied foil tape. On our next camping trip, the A/C was still poor. When I removed the access cover, I saw some of the foil tape had lifted. I pressed it back down. I still felt cold air in the intake, but I didn't have angle of sight to see where it came from.
I purchased two Lascar EL-USB-2-LCD+ datalogging temperature/humidity probes and a Wemo Insight datalogging smart outlet. When everything arrived, I set up the trailer in our driveway and logged the performance over four days.
For the experiment, all bunks had Reflectix inserts installed, all bunk curtains were closed, all interior lights were off, no people were in the trailer, the A/C was set to lowest temp and highest fan speed, and I had a box fan on its lowest speed to circulate the air inside the trailer. The inside temperature probe was placed on the dinette table:
During the experiment, we had a strong thunderstorm and overnight power outage. I reset the breaker the next morning.
After a few days, I pulled all the data. Here's a graph of the power consumed by the entire trailer:
The trailer's baseline power consumption was 100W (probably the inverter) at the very left. With the A/C on, the trailer power oscillated between 400W and 1500W as the compressor switched on and off. However, it was difficult to determine how hard the A/C was running because all the up/down lines just kind of blobbed together.
So, I wrote some perl scripting to compute what percentage of time the compressor was on versus off (the duty cycle). Then I plotted that against the temperature, relative humidity, and dew point data from the temperature sensors. Here's the result:
Despite the A/C being set to maximum cooling, the interior temperature remained between 70F-75F during the day. The A/C ran at around 50% duty cycle during the hottest part of the day. During the fourth day, which was the hottest, the A/C yielded only a 6F delta between the outside (80F) and inside (74F) temperature. At night, the humidity in the trailer rose to 75%-80% because the A/C was not inclined to run.
Not sure what to do next.
