Battery Run Time
I'm curious how long my battery should run before dying while dry camping. Here in CA, the state campgrounds, you can only run the generator between 10am and 8pm, which leaves a substantial amount of ...
Forum Discussion
I think the best thing you can do is run your own tests at the convenience of your house when losing power won't matter. That's how I figured out my requirements. We do a lot of dry camping and figured out what's best for our situation.
Here's what I did using our own personal wants. Quiet hours are taken into consideration, so I don't mind running the genny all the time during those hours. I consider 8PM the quiet hours for my testing, although real world scenario is usually 9-10PM. After we've done whatever hiking (our main activity) we are going to do for the day, it's about 4-5 PM. That puts my genny period between 5-8. I assume I'll be able to charge 3-4 hours. At night, I want to have pretty much all (my) necessities on. Water pump. Water heater. Porch light. Everything else on stand-by (TV, DVD, Radio, etc). Also, phones, 2-way radios, kindle, etc will be charging off the DC ports sometimes. For the winter test, I set the heater at 68 degrees. Temps outside overnight dip to mid 30s. Day reaches into 50s, but warm enough to where it will heat up to the 70s inside the trailer without vents open.
At 5:30 PM I shut the shore power off, just to make sure that the the trailer will run off the batteries (2 x group 24 70 reserve amps) all night and into tomorrow morning. 8AM, still everything still running. Voltage down to 11.7V. By the end of daylight hours, My solar panels have charged batteries to 100%. On a cloudy day, they charge to ~60%, 3 hours of genny time gives it enough charge to last through the night on those conditions again, but still lower levels the following day. I'll be retrofitting the WFCO distro panel with a new converter this weekend to take care of that.
Running this same test in warm weather, genny is not really needed with my solar panels charging and not using the heater at night. However, I like using some AC devices if I can. Toaster, microwave popcorn. And of course air conditioning in our hot summer months.
After I install the coverter this weekend, my next project will be installing an inverter that will supply short bursts of AC, such as a toaster or microwave use without firing up the genny. The inverter output will be tied into the existing general purpose outlets. Be sure to have that done by qualified personell.
The main problem we had at first was that the battery would never be fully charged. Even after being plugged in for a couple days. That made us think something was wrong. Most of these stock converters don't really go into a true boost mode that would be capable of putting a full charge on the battery within 3-4 hours. We would have everything turned off except the fridge and the battery would still be dead by 2AM. After buying a high amp true battery charger and doubling my battery I then begain experiencing true dry camping with comforts. Now my rig never gets turned off. Hasn't been turned off since I installed the solar panels a few months ago. You can read about those in one of my other posts.
Here's what I did using our own personal wants. Quiet hours are taken into consideration, so I don't mind running the genny all the time during those hours. I consider 8PM the quiet hours for my testing, although real world scenario is usually 9-10PM. After we've done whatever hiking (our main activity) we are going to do for the day, it's about 4-5 PM. That puts my genny period between 5-8. I assume I'll be able to charge 3-4 hours. At night, I want to have pretty much all (my) necessities on. Water pump. Water heater. Porch light. Everything else on stand-by (TV, DVD, Radio, etc). Also, phones, 2-way radios, kindle, etc will be charging off the DC ports sometimes. For the winter test, I set the heater at 68 degrees. Temps outside overnight dip to mid 30s. Day reaches into 50s, but warm enough to where it will heat up to the 70s inside the trailer without vents open.
At 5:30 PM I shut the shore power off, just to make sure that the the trailer will run off the batteries (2 x group 24 70 reserve amps) all night and into tomorrow morning. 8AM, still everything still running. Voltage down to 11.7V. By the end of daylight hours, My solar panels have charged batteries to 100%. On a cloudy day, they charge to ~60%, 3 hours of genny time gives it enough charge to last through the night on those conditions again, but still lower levels the following day. I'll be retrofitting the WFCO distro panel with a new converter this weekend to take care of that.
Running this same test in warm weather, genny is not really needed with my solar panels charging and not using the heater at night. However, I like using some AC devices if I can. Toaster, microwave popcorn. And of course air conditioning in our hot summer months.
After I install the coverter this weekend, my next project will be installing an inverter that will supply short bursts of AC, such as a toaster or microwave use without firing up the genny. The inverter output will be tied into the existing general purpose outlets. Be sure to have that done by qualified personell.
The main problem we had at first was that the battery would never be fully charged. Even after being plugged in for a couple days. That made us think something was wrong. Most of these stock converters don't really go into a true boost mode that would be capable of putting a full charge on the battery within 3-4 hours. We would have everything turned off except the fridge and the battery would still be dead by 2AM. After buying a high amp true battery charger and doubling my battery I then begain experiencing true dry camping with comforts. Now my rig never gets turned off. Hasn't been turned off since I installed the solar panels a few months ago. You can read about those in one of my other posts.
