House Battery

[jubileeeducatio]

If I only use my house battery to start generator and occasionally use interior lights, would a 12 volt deep cell battery be a good choice over a 2 6 volt deep cell battery. I almost always plug in when using heat.

[zman-az]

jubileeeducation wrote:
If I only use my house battery to start generator and occasionally use interior lights, would a 12 volt deep cell battery be a good choice over a 2 6 volt deep cell battery. I almost always plug in when using heat.

Yes you will be fine with a 12V battery. However, if you do live off the grid for just one cold night where generators are not allowed and "you need heat" you will wish you had the two 6V batteries.

[Canadian_Rainbi]

Running the furnace on one group 27 battery should get you through one night. A 24 might manage as well. IF they are in good condition AND fully charged AND you are not running a lot of other stuff.

Group 24: about 75 AH. Safe discharge of 50% = 37.5 AH
Group 27: about 100 AH. Safe discharge of 50% = 50 AH

Furnace fan drawing 8 Amps, 50% on time for 10 hours = 40 AH.

Roy Ken has some very good suggestions, especially backyard camping as a test. You can always run into the house if you wake up freezing!

[RoyB]

I would get accustomed to checking my trailer batteries when camping off the power grid and if they get down to around 12.0VDC at the end of the one day/night battery run then you may need bigger batteries. Do some trial runs in your back yard.

It has been my experience to NOT allow my batteries to drop below 12.0VDC before promptly re-charging back up to at least a 90% charge state. This keeps my batteries in a good long life term of good performance.

Of course when adding more batteries then you may have to also increase your on-board converter/charger current size and start doing thing like changing your trailer lights to LEDs and using smart mode charging technology...

It does take some planning to be be successful camping off the power the grid. We found real quick you just can't show up and expect it to work like you want it to. It got dark on us several times around 10PM at night before we got serious about making changes to make it work for the way we like to camp off the power grid.

We do very well using three 12VDC GP24 Interstate deep cycle batteries in parallel giving us around 255AHs with running all the things we want to have ON when camping off the power grid. Then we re-charge our batteries each morning using our 2KW generator and smart mode charging technology to get our batteries back to their 90% charge state so we can successfully do all of this all over again the next day/night run off the batteries.

This is what works great for us. We plan to add some solar panels in the near future to keep us from having to run the 2KW generator as much.

Roy ken

[BillMFl]

IF you don't boondock a deep cycle 12v will do the job. You won't have as much reserve capacity but if you are mostly on shore power or generator it should not make any difference.