naturist
Nomad II
Joined Apr 24, 2008
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Re: Solar discusion thread, is it right for you?
Storing up enough power to run anything through 3 days of rain is simply a matter of sizing (and money, obviously). How many watt-hours do you need for 3 nights of CPAP? If you plug your CPAP into a Kill-O-Watt for a 3 night total usage, the math is simple.67Views0likes0CommentsRe: Solar discusion thread, is it right for you?
My experience is with panels that are now a half-dozen or so years old: some Grape Solar rigid panels and some Rich Solar flexible panels, and neither are very shade tolerant. If newer more shade tolerant panels only drop to 1/5 output on rainy days, that is great news.74Views0likes1CommentRe: Solar discusion thread, is it right for you?
The numbers and conditions that favor one or the other change daily and from situation to situation. What is not changing is that it’s all trending in the direction of solar and away from generators. I own both, have for years. I have a 5500 watt generator for emergency power at the sticks ’n’ bricks. I had a 2000 watt inverter generator for several years until it sprang internal fuel leaks and became both unusable and unrepairable on a camping trip. I have built 3 entire camping/home solar rigs and currently have one running a household refrigerator in an outbuilding and another for boondocking in the RV. The latter features a 400 watt solar panel and a 314 amp-hour Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery, 2200 watt pure sine inverter, and 40 amp charge controller, which is enough power for everything except the AC for indefinite stays in the wild as long as we get a sunny day once a week or so. My experience has been that on a cloudy/rainy day, you get about 1/10the the output from solar that you get on a sunny day, and that a sunny day with no shade, you will get 4-5 times as many watt-hours as you have watt panels, thus my 400 watt panel will produce 1600-2000 watt-hours on a good day. And that’s enough to light up all the lights, fridge and furnace control boards and fans, phone/laptop/tablet chargers, microwave uses I go through on a daily basis. Your mileage may vary, but the silence, lack of exhaust smell and carbon monoxide, oil changes, etc. work for me. The price of components, panels, controllers, inverters, and batteries has come down over the last 5 years to where solar is cheaper in the long run by far. The only advantage left for generators is space/weight for high capacity uses, such as running AC.43Views0likes5CommentsRe: 2024 Fleetwood 28A no power to micowave with house battery only
bid_time might have exaggerated a wee but, but the answer is solid. Very few RVs come with an inverter, and both AC and microwave are 120 volt AC appliances, not 12 volt DC. So nobody runs either while boondocking. If you simply MUST have a microwave to live, you will have to buy and install an inverter, and for a microwave, said inverter MUST be pure sine wave unit, not a modified sine wave one.108Views0likes2CommentsRe: Miles per day?
I would suggest that the answer depends upon your tolerance for mind and body numbing WORK. Mine is low, so I shoot for driving about 6 hours a day tops, which usually means somewhere around 250-300 miles. I can do that every day for a couple weeks. More than that gets me burnt out after the second day. So the question you have to ask yourself is whether you mean this trip to be a (painful) forced march, or a vacation. If the former, heck, 500 miles a day will get you there in a mere 4 days, and you can then collapse in a smoking heap. Or, take 8 days, admire the scenery, stop for roadside attractions of interest, and arrive ready to partay.94Views0likes1CommentRe: House Battery Not Holding Charge , Bad Battery or Converter Issue?
Yeah, a battery that won’t hold a charge is a dead battery. If you really want confirmation, take it to the nearest AutoZone/Advance Auto/O’Reilly’s and ask them to test it. Bet it fails. So whatever you do, do not waste money on one of those 70-80 Amp Hour “marine” batteries. Lead/acid batteries have a lifespan of 300-500 charge cycles, max, and that assumes you discharge it only 50%. Currently (as of the date this is being written) the way to go is to buy the best built and cheapest LiFePO4 battery on the market which I am seeing for $549 online via Amazon or the WattCycle store: the 314 Amp Hour Mini. Cheaper, but lesser quality, $339 for the Dumfume 300 Amp Hour (rated 4,000 charge cycles). Will Prowse has tested both batteries and torn them apart to examine quality of construction, and he recommends them for those applications needing 12 volts. The WattCycle battery is rated for 6,000 charge cycles, should be charged to 100% capacity and can be drained to 20% (for that max life) which will give you 18 years of daily cycling between 20-100%. You can drain it to only 10% and you will still get lifetime service out of it.55Views1like2CommentsRe: Hi all
Welcome to the scrum, Roxanne (and “we”). Small trailer but to each his/her own. Do be sure to keep those e-trikes both out of sight and solidly locked up no matter where you go. E-bikes/trikes are hot items for theft these days, for some reason, and cheap locks are not worth the trouble of using them. We’ll keep the light on for ya out there in the campground somewhere.64Views0likes0CommentsRe: Sodium ion batteries
Battery technology is advancing so rapidly right now that it makes a LOT of sense to wait until you actually need a battery to research and buy the most appropriate one. Trying to stay on top of the best choice at any given moment is a full time job. A job others, such as Will Prowse (and others!) is already doing.56Views0likes0Comments
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