Adding lithium batteries to pickup trucks
I'm looking for a possibility to turn a pickup into a small mobile office where my DW and I can do some work using laptops for hours if needed. I would use the rear seats with a small table surface ha...
Forum Discussion
Hi,
For 6 years I charged 875 amp-hours of lead acid batteries from the OEM 140 amp alternator.
Use a Kill-a-Watt meter to check the maximum draw of the laptops. Do this by running one down until it goes into suspend mode, then plug it into the kill-a-watt and start a disk defrag or other program that will cause the drive to spin. Make sure the screen is on the brightest possible setting.
Once you have that number, double it and multiply by the number of hours you wish to have power, then divide that by 0.75 to find the LI battery bank size in watt-hours.
To add solar take the total number of watt-hours and divide by 5. That ought to give you the panel wattage.
Do not forget the power needed for any internet connection in the calculation. It is small but in fringe areas a booster may be needed too.
For 6 years I charged 875 amp-hours of lead acid batteries from the OEM 140 amp alternator.
Use a Kill-a-Watt meter to check the maximum draw of the laptops. Do this by running one down until it goes into suspend mode, then plug it into the kill-a-watt and start a disk defrag or other program that will cause the drive to spin. Make sure the screen is on the brightest possible setting.
Once you have that number, double it and multiply by the number of hours you wish to have power, then divide that by 0.75 to find the LI battery bank size in watt-hours.
To add solar take the total number of watt-hours and divide by 5. That ought to give you the panel wattage.
Do not forget the power needed for any internet connection in the calculation. It is small but in fringe areas a booster may be needed too.
