Boondocking with a Residential Refrigerator and Solar Power

the average campers adventures in a previous video we described our solar setup for boondocking using a 30 amp charge controller from nature power although this charge controller worked I wanted to upgrade our charge controller to include a digital display showing the current voltage of the batteries and the current charging amps from the solar panel we have temporarily mounted our Go Power charge controller with industrial velcro next to the battery compartment housed beneath the steps we've wired the charge controller with a quick disconnect for the batteries and the solar panel in the future we would like to permanently install the controller in the cabinet above the door and running the wires alongside the doorframe the wires to the solar panel are run between the batteries and secured on the frame with zip ties when we first powered on the charge controller we initially received readings of 0.3 to 0.5 charging amps and change position of the solar a little bit to get a little more sunlight and we're showing point seven a simple move of the solar panel to more direct sunlight changed our readings dramatically bringing in 3.5 amps right now which is fantastic okay it's about the middle of the day and the solar is putting out about 7.0 amps and you can see we're getting quite a lot of sunlight at the mill today take a look real quick show you where the sun's at and what's going on here okay the Sun is just directly above us and I found a nice spot I got a lot of tree cover so we're plenty of sunshine this afternoon keeping our batteries charged no problem and again it's kind of nice to know how many amps are coming in okay last night we had some success with a little different method of trying to conserve power on our refrigerator we turn the refrigerator down and we added some ice to the from the freezer to the refrigerator portion to see if it wouldn't help keep it cool and let me show you what we did here there's the controls that you can turn the power down on the freezer and the refrigerator and it goes all the way up to five and we turn it down to three and then I turned there I turn the refrigerator down to three and then I turn the freezer down to one and you can see we had filled this up with ice put it up in the refrigerator section to try to keep it cool through the night and it still has some ice left in it on both of them so when we woke up right now I have the generator running but when we woke up we had about I think roughly twelve point four 12.5 holes left in the batteries so that was pretty successful our ice didn't even melt and yeah last night our our ice didn't even melt so even though we turned it down that part we still have viable ice for the morning so if you have a razor residential refrigerator maybe consider doing something like that to conserve the batteries and that way it'll leave you a little bit more more juice for other things like oh I don't know watching television at night or whatever if you want to okay after last night run in the the battery power I think it's obvious that we're going to have to add additional batteries and now I just have to figure out kind of where I can put these batteries maybe just two more batteries might do the trick but we have our storage area here for the batteries underneath this step of the motorhome we have four deep cycle batteries in there these are us mm and it's the EXCI model and I was thinking since the battery department comes out here on the side it actually goes right into this area here we already have some some areas for for connections and so forth to get through to that battery so I might be able to run about the important Ruiz and just add my batteries down here in this area maybe build some kind of a a box here to put the batteries on the bottom and I could still have the top for some storage and then I might have to figure out something as far as basic ventilation but for the most part that would be plenty of room to be able to add some additional batteries join us next time on the average campers adventures

Channel: Average Campers

Views: 16,324

Rating: 4.5999999 out of 5

Keywords: RVing, RV, Camping, Travel, Boondocking, Boondocking with a Residential Refrigerator and Solar Power, Solar power, rv residential refrigerator while driving

Id: qEGPBFnMJvw

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2015