Power Sag/Current Issues at Seasonal Site
We are in our first year at a seasonal site we think we will be staying at long term. Everything is great, but the power. We only have a small Jayco 16XRB but even its 8K Btu AC and fridge prove cha...
Forum Discussion
WOW! This is a forum I can appreciate, thanks for all the replies!
First step I guess is I will check how bad the voltage is this weekend.
For some of the other points:
-its close to our house (less than 20mins) so we like the flexibility of being able to just go home should the weather sour
-its $3K a season CAD. With Covid a 1/2 acre lake front vacant piece of land is now $350K and up here, and could be 1.5 hours away. We figure at our age this will be our lake front property, and the shortcomings I am willing to work around.
- the park is huge, and we each have large parcel, trailers aren't stacked. We like our spot as it has a water view out front, and water access in the rear, we don't want to move
- the park owner is flexible. He has already kicked in for landscaping and is open to put money towards the issue. For him to rewire I couldn't even imagine. Our sub is shared by three spots, and I would estimate it is 750 feet from the large sub that feed our side of the park.
It gets hot here, and being a Hybrid, even with the Popout Gizmos the week we left the A/C off it was 40C inside and took hours to cool down with the little window shaker style 8K. We leave it on Econo mode so it just keeps the trailer cool.
I have moved the fridge to Propane already, but even just the A/C all on its own is enough to affect the voltage. We have not popped a breaker yet but I will be curious to see how bad it is the weekend when I measure.
It sounds like if the droop isn't horrible, the Autoformer would be the best bet. If its horrendous my initial plan was to let the site 120v run a charger that accepts a wide input voltage to charge a bank of 2 or 3 200AH deep cycle batteries, and then use a 3000W inverter to run the entire trailer. That cost would be around $1500 I think, and in Canada that autoformer is $700 anyways so its not the end of the world.
I was just curious if it was hard or possible to use batteries to compensate real time but I guess that would be pricey.
Having used MPPT stuff for Solar at my house I understand its not the same, but such as this diagram
I was hopeful a controller existed that would take a 90-230VAC input where the solar panels on an MPPT go, but perform the same functions everywhere else, charging the batteries, feeding the inverter etc. Basically I would totally isolate myself from the park voltage and only use it to run the charger to charge the batteries.
Thanks for all the input, this has been great for a first post. Hopefully the droop is autoformer fixable then this would be simple!
First step I guess is I will check how bad the voltage is this weekend.
For some of the other points:
-its close to our house (less than 20mins) so we like the flexibility of being able to just go home should the weather sour
-its $3K a season CAD. With Covid a 1/2 acre lake front vacant piece of land is now $350K and up here, and could be 1.5 hours away. We figure at our age this will be our lake front property, and the shortcomings I am willing to work around.
- the park is huge, and we each have large parcel, trailers aren't stacked. We like our spot as it has a water view out front, and water access in the rear, we don't want to move
- the park owner is flexible. He has already kicked in for landscaping and is open to put money towards the issue. For him to rewire I couldn't even imagine. Our sub is shared by three spots, and I would estimate it is 750 feet from the large sub that feed our side of the park.
It gets hot here, and being a Hybrid, even with the Popout Gizmos the week we left the A/C off it was 40C inside and took hours to cool down with the little window shaker style 8K. We leave it on Econo mode so it just keeps the trailer cool.
I have moved the fridge to Propane already, but even just the A/C all on its own is enough to affect the voltage. We have not popped a breaker yet but I will be curious to see how bad it is the weekend when I measure.
It sounds like if the droop isn't horrible, the Autoformer would be the best bet. If its horrendous my initial plan was to let the site 120v run a charger that accepts a wide input voltage to charge a bank of 2 or 3 200AH deep cycle batteries, and then use a 3000W inverter to run the entire trailer. That cost would be around $1500 I think, and in Canada that autoformer is $700 anyways so its not the end of the world.
I was just curious if it was hard or possible to use batteries to compensate real time but I guess that would be pricey.
Having used MPPT stuff for Solar at my house I understand its not the same, but such as this diagram
I was hopeful a controller existed that would take a 90-230VAC input where the solar panels on an MPPT go, but perform the same functions everywhere else, charging the batteries, feeding the inverter etc. Basically I would totally isolate myself from the park voltage and only use it to run the charger to charge the batteries.
Thanks for all the input, this has been great for a first post. Hopefully the droop is autoformer fixable then this would be simple!
