realy its a bit of both having a way to charge your batteries, having enough battery capacity and power managment.
what do you have for battery/ies right now? if its just the one the dealer throws in then you are going to have issues. so what you have to figure out is how long your battery last with what you are doing right now and how long you want it to last. for example if your battery starts going dead after 1 night and you normal go out for a long weekend type things then you need over three times the battery capacity. the good thing is that the batteries that come with the camper are only 80AH and if you want them to last you can only use 1/2 of that. but for a rough referance if you are using up that battery to the point where you lights start to dim in 24 hours then you know you are using close to 80AH in one day.
so the easiest thing to do right now is put better batteries in, so what I recomend now is people upgrade with LiFePO4 batteries. for usable AH they are the cheepest battery you can get per AH wise and also by life span. so for instance you could go out and get something like a wattcycle 314AH mini. so thats almost 4 times the total capacity but the difference is with LiFePO4 you can use 100% of the capacity without worring about shortining the life of the battery as they are traditionaly rated at 100% depth of discharge, plus there is no maintenance aside from fully charging them once and a while to keep the cells balanced, and the life span is much much longer than a traditional battey so you will probably go a ong time with out having to replace batteries unless you do something to it.
with the right capacity you can camp as long as you normaly want to camp, then later you can add solar which if sized right will let you go indefinatly, or at least till the tanks need dumping 😉
Exactly , it’s really a mix of charging capability, battery capacity, and power management. If you’re still using the single dealer-installed battery, that’s usually the weak point. A lot of those are only around 80Ah, and with lead-acid you realistically only want to use about half of that.
The first step is figuring out how much power you actually use in a day, then sizing your battery bank for how long you want to camp. For most people, upgrading to a LiFePO4 battery makes the biggest difference. You get far more usable capacity, much longer life, and less maintenance. Something in the 200,300Ah range can be a huge improvement over the stock setup.
Then later, if you add properly sized solar, you can stretch that even further often to the point where tank capacity becomes the real limit instead of battery power.
