setting up a battery bank

mrskittle wrote:
I should have clarified that I'm not interested in going with solar at this point. I plan on wiring the inverter straight to the battery and mounting it in the front of the camper to avoid a long wire run.
I've used the french press for years and enjoy the "camp coffee" I get from my old press. However, sometimes I just want the simple pleasures of life, hence the upgrade from the pop-up to the TT and the opportunity for some drip coffee.

I did a sort of energy audit but testing the draw of each possible motor present in the camper. The exhaust fan is about 4.5 amps, the water pump is up at 7 amps, and so on. I'll still need to assess the draw of anything I want to run with the inverter.

The camper only has one battery at this point. I have a second one that I already had around from using on the pop-up camper. I am looking to mount the second one on the camper and wire them together.

CATraveler covered most of the points I would bring up.

You can use high draw items, but they are in a different range of power draw.
- Energy Audit: A battery monitor is better but you can estimate by taking the amp draw of each item and multiplying by the time that it will be operating. This will give you the amp-hrs used. (for 120v items running on the inverter, you multiply by 10 to get a rough estimate of amp-hr in 12v DC).
- Your batteries are basically starting batteries and mixing two of different age, condition is generally not the best approach. The worst battery will tend to drag the better battery down to it's level. (a pair of 6v golf cart batteries are real deep cycle batteries and will have more amp-hrs and hold up better)
- One of the problems with charging with a generator is as they hit around 80% charge, they accept gradually less amps...to get to 100% takes a very long time. They also like to live life at 100% charge, so between trips put them on a charger. Below 50% is generally considered bad. A compromise is to charge to 80% and then limit the drawdown to 50%...so you only have 30% of the rated amp-hr for the battery bank as usable. So if your energy audit says you need 50 amp-hr per day, you are probably looking at needing around 170amp-hr battery bank (assuming you charge each morning with the generator).