Great Smoky Mountain National Park (No Power

RoyB wrote:
We take alot of photos as well. Got a big surprise one morning at ELKMONT with three or four wild pigs running thru the camp. Rangers said they have quite a few wild pigs there. They keep trying to take them out but keep coming back. Not natural for the area. I didn't like the open area of CADES COVE. Reminded me of a truck stop style of camping haha... Great for doing daily hiking around the cades cove motor trail however... We have got several photos of bear in the Cades Cove motor trail usually around where the old church's are located. The Cades Cove trail sure does gets dark up there around 10PM hehe... If you start out at 4:30PM or so it's usually 10PM when get back around to the start position.

We found solar panels will not work well in the Smoky Mtn National Park. Its like a rain forest cover in the two or three camp sites there.. Especially ELKMONT. We will run our 2KW generator at ELKMONT for three hours each morning starting at 8AM during breakfast. Having solar panel capability is just another source of re-charge power you can incorporate - We would have to have our generator around for those times solar panels don't get high sun to gaurentee our 255AH battery bank starts each day/night run off the batteries being at 90% charge state. Otherwise they won't make it through the night for us and eventually do harm to the batteries if we continue to do use them in that mode. There is a place and time for both battery re-charge systems. In our situation the generator is number one priority and the smaller solar 120WATT panels would be just a gap filler to help out at times. We are just now starting to look at adding three 120WATT solar panels to my POPUP trailer roofline. The MAX DC current I will get during the high sun is around 18AMPS DC for about 5-6 hours. That will be pretty close to re-charging my 255AHs battery banks being discharged down to it 50% level. However my rule will still remain if the 255AH battery bank does not attain at least 90% charge state then I can't use it. My work around for this may be I have to run the generator for a hour or so first to get over the high current demand period for the battery bank and then let the solar panels continue the battery bank re-charge period before the high sun goes away.

These are just my issues - others may have another way of getting around the problem. It seems there is no place for cheating mother nature here however... If you use 300WATTS overnight from the battery bank you have to put it back in within the time you have allowed before you can do it all over again. Of course I could just cut back on using so much DC current from the batteries but I like to do what I do. Flashlights and candles went away a long time ago for us haha...
We pretty much camp at ELKMONT off our battery bank just like we do a regular camp site with electric power with the exception of Air Conditioning.

Roy Ken