New Endless Breeze fan and B&D 1093 charger

[tragusa3]

This is less of a question and more of a report. I think we've finally gotten ourselves fairly prepared for the dry camping we tend to do in local National Parks.

Last year, we got the genny. However, our onboard charger is junk, so just this week I picked up a B&D 1093 charger. I tested it along with the genny, and it was charging at 14.8v, which should get us a fairly quick recharge while running the genny.

We also have a hard time sleeping at night without air movement. Our trailer didn't come with any sort of fan in the ceiling vents. We thought about getting a Fantastic Fan vent, but just opted to get the Endless Breeze model. We figure it will be more flexible.

So, I wondered what running the fan all night would do to our battery. Will we be able to make it on a daily 3 hour generator window? Last night, I ran a test here at the house. I measured battery voltage to be 12.58v. I put the fan on low (which is impressive)at 10pm last night. I open the door at 8am this morning to find the fan still running! I shut it off and went and checked the battery voltage. After 10 hours with the fan, it measured 12.48v. According to online charts, that means it used 25% of my battery with all that running! I'm pleased with that.

We have LED lights, so even with other power usage, we should be just fine. If we add a second battery in the future, we can be downright energy hogs. 🙂

Anyway, nothing terribly important or earth shattering, but I couldn't find any other threads discussing real world usage of these fans. Maybe this can help someone.

On another note: Any ideas on how to secure the Endless Breeze into a ceiling vent? The fan measures the same dimensions as the vent opening. I've thought of bungees or velcro or hooks? I don't want to screw into the ceiling, so maybe velcro... any thoughts?

[MrWizard]

sounds Normal
about 2 amps is normal drain, 2*10hrs = 20ampHrs or 25% of an 80ampHr battery

[mena661]

RoyB wrote:
WE use a couple of those O2COOL AC/DC 10-inch fans from WALMART. They work great since you can run them from 120VAC using a xfmr, or 12VDC using as adapter, or off of internal D-CELLS.

Truly a fan for all ocassions... Doesnt hardly make any noise... Perfect for hanging on the tent end supports in our off-road POPUP.


I will also use this fan to sit behind a a oil-filled electric heater if we need to move some warm air around the room better...

Roy Ken

We have one of these too and it works great. Have used it only from the batteries so far. Probably get another one.

[RoyB]

WE use a couple of those O2COOL AC/DC 10-inch fans from WALMART. They work great since you can run them from 120VAC using a xfmr, or 12VDC using as adapter, or off of internal D-CELLS.

Truly a fan for all ocassions... Doesnt hardly make any noise... Perfect for hanging on the tent end supports in our off-road POPUP.


I will also use this fan to sit behind a a oil-filled electric heater if we need to move some warm air around the room better...

Roy Ken

[tragusa3]

Snowman, I'd rather not buy another fan. It's hard enough looking at this little piece of plastic for $80!!! Besides, our trailer is only 15'. Based on the airflow this one fan puts out, I figure it will replace all the air in the trailer every few seconds. 😉

Best way to tell though is by doing...we better get out and camp!

[tragusa3]

Thanks for the info Snowman. That verifies that we sould be ok. Of course, my test didn't include the fridge, a little furnace, the water pump...

We've never gotten in battery trouble, so I think maybe we're being more frugal than we need be. I'll stop being such an energy police.

Roy, fortunately, we live right up on the northwest corner of the state. Usually, we don't have near the bug issues that the rest of the state has. I say "usually", because these record rains this year and no real winter, have left us "buggy". Most of our camping is along the BRP corridor. In fact, we get to test the whole setup next weekend for a 3 night trip to Linville Falls, NC 🙂

[RoyB]

You did good....

We use our fantastic roof fan to pull in the cool nighttime air thru some cracked windows on the other side of the trailer.

Now figure out how you can keep those little bitty mosquitoes you have down there in the Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests from being sucked thru the screens and cracks of the trailer..

They are mean little critters for being as small as they are... The only place we could get away from them was to setup right on the Atlantic Shoreline beaches.

A good friend of ours lived on Youngs Island near Hollywood SC and he would have to put on a head net just to go pick tomatoes out of his garden haha...

Roy ken

[Snowman9000]

OK, this is the blind leading the blind, but here goes. 🙂

You'll be fine with that. We just dry camped for a week with one group 27 battery. When fully charged, it shows 12.7 to 12.8v. That's hard to measure because of the surface charge after charging, which raises the reading. But overall, with good batteries, my RVs have shown more like 12.7-12.8v fully 100% charged. However, once you start charging at your camp, you'll probably only be getting them up to 12.6.

I don't think you used 25% of your juice, though. You can repeatedly run down to 12.0-12.1. You only dropped 0.1v, so you used about 15-20% of your juice by running the fan all night.

For our single battery, I found that I could get a 90% charge in about an hour with a similar smart charger to yours. That seemed hard to believe, but we went for a week with the same process. From reading here, I learned that when the battery bank is accepting about 5 amps per battery or per 100 amps capacity, it is about 90% charged. 17 amps = 80% charged, and 10 amps = 86%. I was getting down to about 6-7 amps after an hour, and called it good. After dissipating the surface charge, I'd measure about 12.6v to begin the next 24 hour cycle. By the end of the week, that number was sometimes in the 12.5's.

We didn't run the fan all that much. We ran LED lights as needed but usually only a couple of bulbs going at night, water pump as needed, TV with antenna booster for an hour or so, fridge controls and other overhead, and sometimes a few minutes of the furnace in the morning. This routine would put us consistently at 12.1v at 10 AM, when the generator hours began. So we were using about half a volt per daily cycle. Based on all that, assuming you have LED lights, I think you'll be in good shape.

[KJINTF]

You might want to install a Fantastic Fan Vent to compliment your endless breeze fan.

We have two of the fan vents plus the endless breeze. A few really hot nights we run all three of them all night long not sure how much power they take but it's not much. We never have any issue with battery power with only two GC batteries.