Possible nice off grid setup to avoid generator usage at all.

[reeman]

Most of the time we have only been camping off grid for no more than 3 days. In the off grid parks where we camp there is not much sun so solar is not a good option. But where we love to camp the most it is beautiful and peaceful in the forest campsites we love the best. I hate the sound of generators especially the ignorant ones that run all night so we avoid those kind of camping noise zoo remote parks where you feel stupid if you complain about the ignorant characters that are not there for the peace and beauty but are just pretending to camp.

The off grid setup that I am thinking about creating is different. It would extend our camping time by at least 2 to three days. Right now we are working on only 140 ah over 3 days of potential before needing to charge up. What I am thinking of doing is putting a splitter disconnect switch setup in place of the battery disconnect. Then running a new heavy set of wires to the a frame hitch and putting a standard plug battery heavy connector on the front of the trailer separate from the existing batteries.

That way with our pickup truck we could bring another single 150 ah 12volt in a special box in the box on the pickup and have plug in connectors to run off an auxiliary deep cycle agm, flooded LA or even an expensive Lith ion battery extending the off grid potential considerably. The nice part of this kind of setup is that it is more flexible with our trailer that will not take Lith Ion without a huge expense to change over the inverter charging system which works fine with FLA and AGM but would cost far too much to change over so the cheap route is to find some other way to change batteries the same as carrying an extra propane tank in the truck.

[Airboss68]

ignorant characters that are not there for the peace and beauty but are just pretending to camp.

You could just get a tent and be a real camper. Then you do away with your generator entirely and not annoy the real campers in tents when you do run it.

[Morich]

Looking at overall ease of setup, use during camping as well as keeping cost down, just adding several batteries in the ruck would seem to be a good way to go.
But how to connect and use will depend on how you operate. For our use at the time we wanted added battery power, we just set up the extra batteries and ran a heavy connection to the front where we then tied them together with jumper cables. It was before the newer type batteries and we did not use it enough to tell any difference in long term life of the battteries but they were all lead acid, so we were willing to go for any shorter battery life we got.
Part of our fishing crew was a guy who had access to lots of "old" batteries that were no longer considered good enough for starting cars in cold times, so they got changed out before they were really "dead". He had an old beer wagon with about half the rear full of batteries and we could have lit half the city off him!

But where we camped and what we did was way past where it would bother anybody!

[reeman]

Morich I don't think that running multiples if one set or single has a different charge profile is a good idea. It may work fine if both sets are at full charge but not if one set is down in charge.

That is why the use of a switch might be the best way to prevent troubles down the road with the charging profiles causing batteries to overcharge and ark out in the cells. I am sure that one could spend through the nose and have custom 12 volt DC charge pattern leveling circuitry built into the system, but that is not what I am thinking. With isolation of the sets of batteries I could even have two heavy 6 volts golf cart batteries in a box on the truck in series and have much more off grid time with an isolation setup.
Or even use them to weld the frame of the trailer is something goes wrong going down the road 400 amp hour of extra power could do some serious welding in a pinch

Using batteries to top up other batteries is going to cause issues with charging profiles and balancing of the voltage and can very quickly destroy batteries.

The nice part of the setup I have in mind is that the new wiring to the isolating switch from the auxiliary battery connection does not need to be heavy gauge at all. Because it will never be under heavy charge load and can have a fuse to make sure that a sudden short does not case a wire to burn up. So the extra wire should be in a conduit where exposed coming out of the bottom of the trailer and running to a front connector quick connector in a water and dirt proof box on the A frame. 8 gauge wire is plenty of ampacity for our 12 volt usage on the trailer but 10 gauge would do. It is far better to go bigger than smaller but we need no where near the kind of draw if the current only flows in one direction to the 12 volt fuse panel on the trailer and is not meant for high amp charging from the 120 ac to 12 volt dc on the trailer.

It is better to trickle charge fla or agm deep cycles rather than warming them up too fast which can cause loss of fluid on FLA and even explosions if the current is too high. The charging setup on the trailer does just that but increases the wattage in relation to how high the charge level is in the batteries so when it starts out it is at a higher wattage and then lowers the charge rate as the batteries fill. When we are camped with shore power I just switch the battery switch off if the batteries are fully charged and turn them back on when we go. The trailer break away is on a separate circuit from the interior so it is safe to run down the road with the batteries switched off.

The setup I have in mind will be a better wiring setup than what comes stock from the factories on most trailers which is just a insulated wires dangling on the A frame held by chintzy screw down clamps to the frame if even that. I had to use zip ties to secure the factory wire leads and put some shielding where they rubbed and were wearing the insulation of the wires on the A frame going down the road. The wiring on our Winnie Drop was that bad right from the factory and was not properly secured by the cheapo dealer in Oregon before delivery to the original owner who imported into Canada. We even had to rewire the signal and clearance lights which had a ground wire that shorted out in the frame somewhere and caused issues with the turn signals when the clearance lights came on for night driving. The external wiring was poorly conceived and executed to say the least. I already posted about how to isolate that problem if your Winnie suddenly starts to flash the clearance lights and flash both sides of the brake lights when you turn on the turn signals when the clearance lights are on. A problem that has happened to other owners of Winnie Drops and Minnie Winnies in the past.

Our trailer should not require more than a 12 volt 50 amp fuse to power everything necessary without causing voltage drops from an external deep cycle. The highest usage being the heater and fans as we never use 12 volts for the fridge other than the circuit switching on the gas functions. Apart from that the tv uses 17 watts and dvd radio uses about as much as a car radio which is 12 watts maximum with the volume turned up to the speakers. The lighting uses no more than 10 watts at a time and the water pump because it is intermittent uses slightly more depending on frequency of use.
So our usage is no more than 30-40 amp hours per day during the summer and 50-60 if we use the furnace a lot.

With 120AH realistically available from 2 12 volt AGMs in parallel we get 3 days without taking the batteries down in voltage. If we purchase two golf cart 200ah that weight in at about 200 lbs for the pair it will increase our off grid time to a full two weeks during the summer. But a good single 12 volt heavy 110AH it will add at least two days to our off grid potential 3 if we are camping in summer.

One thing about owning one of these newer cheaper travel trailers, you either open your wallet and be prepared to get hosed big time by RV dealers for fixing even the little things or learn to do a lot of things yourself like we have needed to do to make the trailer safe, reliable and more versatile.

[Morich]

What you are saying about the charge on different levels of the same battery sounds correct.
But then on the other hand, it IS what most all motorhomes use to recharge the coach batteries after we run them down while camping, so possibly less problem you expect?

The stand issue method of recharging the coach batteries is to use various gizmos, either the older mode solenoid or newer BIM to tie both house and coach batteries together to let the start and coach batteries both connected to the engine alternator do the recharge.
Winnebago has been using that for as long as I remember or have looked back on, without many complaints about the batteries. The mode solenoid is often a problem after 15-25 years but I don't see too much complaint on batteries from that issue.

But those batteries do need to be the same type for best use.

[Marine359]

A much simpler, but more expensive solution is to buy a portable LiFePo4 power station, and just plug your SP cord into it. No wiring required. If you’re using 50ah/day, a pretty inexpensive 600wh powerstation gives you one extra day; 1200wh gives you two extra days. You could also use your powerstation to offload many 12v load chores which will extend the days of your house battery. We use a cheapo ($200) 300wh powerstation to offload device charging and cpap. Throw the powerstation in your TV, so when you drive around you give it some recharging. That, along with consumption conservation extends our boondocking by about one day. In the east, wide open solar charging opportunity is limited. But, in most CGs we can collect 15-25 ah on sunny days by using our soft portable panel which has a 30ft cable.

We live in the mountains where there are frequent power outages. Having a powerstation is indispensable. We’ll probably get a bigger one soon, big enough to run our household fridge.

[reeman]

Marine359 a 120 volt lithium portable power station would be nice indeed, instead of a gas or propane gen set. But the trailer batteries would need to be switched off otherwise the loss due to heat in the ac to dc charging circuit would be a fairly high amp hour drain. Even the best slow charging 120Vac to 12Vdc convert fair amounts of energy to heat and most run the unit fan while charging the battery. So increasing the number of conversion steps wastes some energy. The nice part of what I have in mind is that there will be no conversion steps to the 12 volt dc side of the interior trailer wiring it will work directly not through the 120 ac side then another conversion step down to 12 dc. As it is we do not have DC to AC except for our TV which runs off a car type low wattage 12dc to 120ac lighter plug nicely and uses very little of the current to do the conversion. It would be better and more efficient to get a 12 volt 24 inch tv but they are getting stupid expensive and very hard to find. I am tempted to create one myself by bypassing and removing the ac circuity on a decent cheap LED high def 24 inch TV which is possible on some that have a separate board for what was once called the dog house where the power is converted to DC in a tv. That way it could run right off the existing 12 volt system in the trailer instead of adding a conversion step.

We use a 100 watt solar panel sometimes but find that the majority of our camping spots are not great for that purpose. I wind up chasing the sun through the trees to keep the wattage up. Most of the time the panel only gets slightly over 40-50 usable charging watts which helps but not much. Far better to use the panel to charge auxiliary batteries that can be moved to a location with more direct sun in some places we camp.
In my way of thinking the more power conversion steps one can avoid the better the offgrid wattage use profile will be.

[powercat_ras]

I just purchased four good 100 AH (1.3 Kilowatt) Capacity LiFe04 batteries for $ 278 each including shipping from Amazon, LISUATELI 100 AH, in early November. I load tested all 4 and all produced at least 1.3 Kilowatts driving an 120 VAC output inverter. They are the only sub $ 300 battery I found that has an internal BMS module that protects the battery from damage from trying to charge with full input current at too low a temperature (-5C or 23F). These only weigh 35 pounds each. These batteries are sealed but not water tight so I also bought Group 29 battery boxes to weather protect them. I drilled a couple drain holes in the bottom of each battery box to ensure that they would not collect water from condensation inside the cases. They output 13.6 at full charge and they output 12.0 volts when they are 90% discharged. So you get a usable max capacity of about 1.1 Kilowatt ( 90 AH ) each, if you limit discharge to 90%. This makes them last a lot more charge/discharge cycles vs. trying to get them all the way down to the minimum of about 3%, plus you hit most inverter's shutdown voltage before the LiFe04 is 3% left, anyway.

In addition to the LiFe04 battery or batteries you will need a means to charge them, it takes a charger designed for them that puts out at least 14.4 volts to bring them to full charge. The recommended charge rate is up to 20 amps each. They allow a charge rate of 30 (0.3 Capacity i.e. C) but recommend 20 (0.2 C)

You really can't run LiFe04 and Lead Acid on the same system except to do a full switch-over. The other draw back is that you have to have different charging systems or manually reprogram a dual purpose charger as it is switched back and forth.

[Marine359]

Reeman,
Yes indeed using a powerstation to plug into your ac shore power does waste some energy. But it’s all about convenience. If you waste 10% on inverting to ac, so what. Further, if you use the powerstation primarily for offloading, you come out way ahead. Every ah you save by offloading is an ah that remains in your house battery. We now can go 3 days without generator by using offloading. And, we have a freakin 12v compressor fridge that hogs 50ah/day. Can’t offload that booger. Just a bit of solar makes it happen. We’re adding more solar so we can go 5 days. That’s about the limit of the consecutive days of boondocking we do. Your solution is elegant. Old and lazy sometimes conquers the day for us. If we can afford to buy a bigger (1,00wh or more) powerstation, Nirvana will have arrived. BTW: freezing ice packs when you have sp, then sticking them in the fridge when boondocking cuts way back on fridge consumption. Also, you don’t have to go thru sp with a powerstation. You can actually switch off your house batt and connect the powerstation to your 12v system using 12v (cigarette adapter outlet) to alligator clips.

[reeman]

Yes we also use freezer packs to save hassles with getting the fridge cold before starting the appliance. All great little tips on how to extend by lowering energy consumption off grid. Here in Canuck land LiFe04 is also getting less expensive. Would absolutely love to get it as a lighter high energy source but the bucks are not there for the expense quite yet.

When we replaced the FLA with AGM last year it made a bit of a difference in that the batteries can be discharged down more than FLAs and the weight on the A frame did not increase. I am reading that I can put AGMs in the trailer if we rig up a good battery monitor system to make sure they never off gas and some newer well designed trailers do not put the batteries on the hitch and come with AGMs stock even put in on their side in a special frame accessible under the bed or even in a closet space at the bottom with a door to the outside wall so that they can be replaced easily on a specially designed slide out battery tray.
If we convert some of our storage on the lighter side of the trailer way we could easily put two single 20lb propane tanks or a single thirty lb on the A frame and have the batteries opposite the slide out side which is heavier without changing the hitch weight or even lessing it slightly and at the same time improve the axle weight distribution balance of the trailer design.
As it is the trailer is 200 lbs heavier on the slide out side than the passenger side going down the road which is not great and does explain why the lippert 3500 lb axles on this design of Winnie Drop and some Rpods of the same design bend on the slideout side and not the passenger side. Even though we never load it anywhere near the max 3700 lb gross weight rating of the trailer.

Eventually we will spend the bucks to upgrade the cheap power inverter on the trailer and go to light high energy LiFe04 inside the unit. My estimate to do the job right is about 2500 Canuck bucks or 2000 US if we do the work ourselves. So the cost is worth the gain in off grid potential the same as changing the low spec axle to one that will not fail like the original lippert one did.
The problem with expensive batteries like Lithiums is they are a huge target for bush whacking thieves as are external batteries and propane tanks in some places that we camp. We have seen some very disgusted campers who have had their gear stolen right off the trailer when they went hiking or went to get something. Batteries, generators and solar panel are an especially big target in some places in the bush.
in remote areas of the city of Surrey BC thieves even steal trailers and take them and sell them to people who use them as rental housing illegally as mortgage helpers. There is also a black market for off grid gear here in BC and it is not just for vehicles like jeeps and toyota landcruisers like in the past. It is also the survivalist crowd and growing homeless desperate people of today as of late. So a lock box for the back of our pickup as a deterrent is the next step before we rig up an auxiliary power box.

[B.Rad]

We removed the Onan generator to install 1680Ah of LiFePO4 prismatic batteries (8 banks of 4 @ 280Ah). Able to run the 12k BTU mini split A/C for days on end if necessary.