"OFF GRID POWER" IN A CARAVAN - WE EXPLAIN IT!! How?? Why?? How much?? & YOU CAN WIN A FRIDGE!!!

welcome back guys hey this one is going to be all about off-grid power the system we've got how it works how much powers things used how long does it take to recharge and how bloody good it is when you're traveling full time so before we get into that i'll jump downstairs and tell you about a little bit of a giveaway we've got sorted out then i'll get back up and talk about the solar where are you dear fresh years how are you i'll even tell you how much the mrs hairdryer uses and the hair straightener and every other bloody appliance under the sun that she likes to carry in our caravan rylo come with me i'll show you what we're going to give away i've got the beautiful wife rebecca filming for me hang on turn around i can't resist showing your beautiful face dear anyway we're in a lovely spot it's called lake indonera i think somewhere near tintana we're in sa now but anyway just a little bit it is valentine's day just for a bit of background info we're giving away a fridge can you believe it holy moly now you can't really tell that that's a fridge because i've got so much storage fitted to the front of it now but it's a dometic crx110 um and we've joined forces with the guys from crvc caribbean rv camping and they're going to give away to one of you lucky guys either a crx 110 or an 85 whatever's going to suit your rig or your van or your pop top whatever you want to put it in you get to choose right and they'll send it out to you so all you have to do same as when we give away the battery system and the charger just jump on the link in the video description that'll take you to a landing page and just put your details in there then they'll send us a couple of random entries you have to be subscribed to our youtube channel that's our one big thing um and then just enter via the landing page and you're done random draw we'll let you know we'll draw it in i'll put the dates down here because i think we're going to run the comp for a week but um yeah i'll put the dates down here so you all know and there you go you can win one of these how six that inside 110 heaps of room freezer up the top meat beers a couple of cc's waters soft drink for the kids hey we like it it's a good thing anyway while we're here i want to show you because we're talking about off-grid battery systems i'm going to talk mainly about the one in the van but while we're here i'll show you how much battery power this one pulls coming off the 200 amp btec in the car all right so with here if you're swinging here babe i don't know if you'll be able to see it too well but we have got the simurin panel in here uh if we go up to there that tells us what everything's pulling so at the moment that fridge is just running and it's pulling 1.95 amps or nearly 2 amps out of the battery right now that wouldn't be pulling flat out i know when it's a really hot day and if i crank it up to the coldest setting it pulls it about 4.5 4.8 amps so there you go also while we're here we've got discount codes like we do with my generator i'll put them down below you can jump online store wide use those codes whenever save you a bit of cash they'll also be in the video description right so while i'm up on the roof i'll turn this around and i'll show you what we've got up here so on the roof of our van we have four 185 watt panels which means we have 720 watts of solar and as you can see we don't have much more real estate to put any up here right so i think one of the best investments you can make is fit as much solar to your roof as you can possibly fit with the real estate you have now there's a few reasons for that um the biggest one being the more solar the more sun you capture the more power you put back into your batteries which means they're going to charge up faster and you can use your battery more often yeah so it just makes things better but it also you've got so many things to deal with when you've got solar panels right so not only have you got cloudy days you've got trees from shading campsites and that sort of stuff but you've also got all this stuff on your roof your tv antenna when it's up your aircon your hatches when they're up your dust suppression fan everything likes to cast a shadow right and as soon as you put a bit of a shadow over any of these squares on these solar panels you lose input so the more solar you've got up the top the more efficient your system is going to be at catching the sun and punching power back into that battery which is what it's all about you've got to regenerate that power all right now a question big question we get a lot about solar is why don't you run slimline panels what about the weight all that sort of thing well yes the only downside to glass panels is they're heavier but when you do your research they're pretty much the only reliable option in the caravan market these days so there's been a lot a lot of dramas with slimline panels once they get hot their efficiency reduces they don't put in as much power they fail a lot so until they can find one that's going to stand the test of time and run for a couple of years without any dramas i'm going to stick with the glass panels from enterdrive because they have never let me down and they punch in a heap of solar so to give you a bit of a heads up i reckon on a really good day perfect conditions we get about 30 amps of solar coming in in um in a perfect world i would love one more panel to punch it up closer to 40 amps that would be really good but like i said we don't have the real estate on our next van i think we'll probably go full 23 footer so we'll be able to squeeze another panel on up the top here and we'll have 800 watts plus which will be killer while i'm up here on the roof i might as well show you uh it's a good idea to keep your panels clean as well if you want to get the most solar out of them now a bit of dust ain't going to make too much difference you know i've tried before when they're a bit after a dusty road i check the input and then i'll clean them and have a look yeah you might you'd be lucky to gain up to an amp right but when you start getting stuff like this over the whole corner of the panel see how much dust there which means it's thrown a shadow under that dust right so if you just get up now and then i know my van's good to go i can get up here and walk around a lot of other vans aren't really suitable to walk on the roof so make sure you know your like your roof loading capacity if you can walk around or not otherwise get a ladder get a microfiber cloth on the end of a broom or something and just sweep your panels down or if you go through a big truck wash you can give them a good blast but generally i just grab a microfiber panel a microfiber cloth and i just give them a good wipe like this um i'll do that every now and then depends how much dusty roads you do how much rain you've had and all that sort of stuff but make sure you keep them clean that way you'll always be getting the optimum amount of input from your panels into your battery anyway let's go inside i'll show you the power plant uh the battery pack and the system and we'll show you how it all works how we monitor it and what all our appliances use alrighty so in the van let's have a quick recap about the system we have shown you in other videos before but um let's start fresh so you've got it in your heads before we show you how much it all pulls right so the whole battery system and battery management system is bang under here so under the seats keeps the weight over the axles you can't quite see there's a big 400 amp lithium white pack along there long skinny one fits under there then the whole board the battery management board has the dc to dc charger on it which comes from the car and pumps 40 amps into the battery through the anderson plug then you've got the solar controller which takes all the solar off the roof and then you've got like the relay drivers and the smarts for all the monitoring system and all that sort of stuff this is all pre-wired by inner drive sent to the caravan manufacturer to install in a position that fits in your van so they can customize those boards to fit under your bed under your seat whatever sort of compartment you've got right then you've got isolators you've got breakers and you've got a balancing system which helps charge all the lithium cells individually and keep them all at their premium sort of optimum battery health right so i'll leave that in a nutshell that's pretty much that's all the gear all the smarts and the chargers all live under there while we're looking at the battery system under this other panel is the big 3000 watt inverter charger combi so that turns on air inverter makes all our appliances work and it's also a 120 amp charger when plugged into mains there you go now up this side easy to access and easy to look at is our battery management panel which shows we've got our inverter control which we can turn it on and off and adjust our input current through our mains run a generator all that sort of thing through that one and if we want to run any appliances off our 240 volt plugs we turn that on i'll show you that in a minute the sign marine gauge that is one of the smarts under there and it takes all the sort of data from each appliance in the van runs it through a little relay system down there sends it up to the screen and it tells you it's also got extra inputs for water tanks and stuff so we know how much water is in our tanks underneath by the gauge on here but this is what we really want to know so it tells us how many amps has gone into our house battery or coming out of it how much solar is coming in from the roof how much power our fridge is using and then common loads is all our other 12 volt appliances so like any 12 volt plugs in the van that we might be running phone chargers off um or a cigarette lighter socket charging something or the tvs plugged in on standby mode all that sort of stuff comes through there um up here is it's got a little fuse panel for 12 volt things if you blow a fuse a little light comes on that's never happened so that's handy we've never blown a fuse and then over this side is our epro battery monitor uh that shows all our battery health it's sort of a scaled down version of what the side marine one is so you come over here you see that's 59 come over here the epro ones 59 as well but what it shows it'll that 17.2 amps that it's showing there is that's the solar coming in minus any of the loads in the van so you'll see 72. 17.2 amps coming in but if you come over here uh and go to solar you'll see that we've got 11 and 12 so we've got 23 amps of solar coming in but we've also got six amps of current draw there four from the fridge and two and a half from common loads so you just get your head around it and it shows you how many amps is coming in or out how many volts your battery's at and it also shows which is handy uh how many watts is coming in or out so there you go it's a little bit to get get your head around i know we've been using it for a few years so i'm really sort of uh well versed on it and it's a super simple system once you get in you pretty much set and forget we don't touch any of the controls we don't change any settings all we do is read those things look at our battery health and we know when our battery is getting down battery's getting up and what we can use and what we can't use right in this fan we can use everything which is sick so let's get into that i'm going to get out all the appliances we're going to run the washing machine and we'll show you on here how much everything uses so off-grid battery systems why is lithium a good thing well the biggest thing in caravaning is it keeps the weight down right so that battery we've got so it's 400 amps of lithium and it weighs 60 something kilos now if we were to get the same in an agm battery we'd be closer to 300 kilos right so that's a big difference to start with so everyone's always chasing that payload so they want to be able to put more in their van which means their vans need to be lighter and you can only tow three and a half ton with most things so lithium is the way to go for weight saving but it's also got other benefits as well so the lithium systems can handle higher current draws so that's why we can use our 3000 watt inverter and run our aircon right which i'll show you how much it pulls in a minute because it can handle it the lithium cells can handle it agm's can as well but not for as long all right they get hot they want to shut down they lose voltage whereas lithium retains its cell voltage like over 12 volts right down to zero percent whereas you get an agm battery you get down to around 30 a state of charge and you're well under 12 volts which means a lot of inverters will just cut out okay and another thing they charge they charge like just about with the right charger about three times faster than an agm battery so when you've got solar coming in and you've got you you're driving down the road and you've got your dc to dc charge coming in all that stuff is going to work heaps faster and pump that back battery that lithium battery back up to full state of charge up to three times faster than an agm which means you can drive an hour down the road not 10 hours down the road and you'll have a full system ready for the next night to use all your appliances again before i get into plugging them in right if you ever want to know how much power something uses for your inverter if say let's just say you've got a 2000 watt inverter if you look on the back of your appliance there will always be a sticker and it should say 220 to 240 volts and then it should have like a peak power usage and this one says 500 watts so you know that should run easily it's a little milk frother hit and run off anything over a 500 watt inverter right or a thousand watt inverter would do it easy so you look at all those appliances they'll have a description on the back and you'll know if you can run it off your system right all right let's go we'll start laying everything out because you know what beck has i think beck's probably got more household appliances in this caravan than other ladies have in their whole house oh my god that is absolutely bold hey mate it would not surprise me so let's get them all out because this is super interesting everyone's always asked us like we never actually carried a toaster and um sandwich press sandwich for like that's a recent addition in the last 12 months coffee machine now we're um where's microwave there as well uh what do you use for your hair darling you've got a hair dryer you've got a hair straightener you've got a curler as well which i never use i actually know i like so when i uh wash my hair i dry it off before bed and i would use my hair straightener twice a year no joke so but it still comes along you just never know you never know when you might take me out for dinner well i do have something i'm too good of a cook we don't need to go out all right so what else do you got where is all that stuff babe i'll let beck get all that out give me a sec all right let's kick off with some of the more common appliances that everybody's going to run which is like the 12 volt stuff to give you an idea of what that sort of pulls now i think uh the 12 volt water pump in your caravan is going to be the most power-hungry 12-volt appliances other than maybe a big charger that you plug in right so our pump is up here we can turn our pump on let's have a look at our 12-volt load sorry over here and it's currently at 3.2 i've turned that pump on all the way there you go picks up to about nine amps so it's about six amps of current draw to run your 12 volt pump happy days um the washing machine everyone wonders if it only works on 240 volt no it's really low current draw hey it doesn't take much so come in here um all it does is obviously it runs the water pump like that but it also runs power at the same time what you will have to do is turn the inverter on here so come over here so say we want to use it you just press that button that turns the combi on under the seat down there the 3000 watt inverter you come in here um have you got your stuff in there ready to go all right turn her on dear there we go so we'll come back and have a look here we are common loads 3.2 you can see as it pumps water in and it starts turning it's still pulling under 10 amps so nothing that's the washing machine going it hardly uses any power i know when it is doing a full spin cycle it pumps up to about 15 amps of current draw but it doesn't spin for that long right because it's only a two kilo washing machine so really efficient and easy to use when you're off grid so we use that flat out mate we run it all the time we generally run out of water before we run out of battery power like i've said before it's all well and good to have the world's biggest lithium battery and a huge inverter to run everything but you're still limited by the capability of being able to recharge those batteries you have to have good solely you have to have good charges to get it back in that's the only way to replenish that battery and be able to use all those appliances again righto now come and have a look at this plethora of her appliances laid out here look at it all we haven't even got at all she couldn't even find the hair straightener no i can't so i think she just got embarrassed so she didn't want to show that anyway um let's have a crack look all we got to do with our van like i said you just turn on the inverter and away you go so it's super easy that way every 240 volt socket in our van works as if you're on a powered site or if you're at home as soon as you hit that button and it's all safety control too this is all regulated it's got breakers and safeties and temperature switches and all that sort of stuff so if it gets too hot it cuts out if you use too much current which i show you it will cut out it can't overcharge because it's limited through the inverter and that sort of thing it's a super safe and reliable system and we've run the same thing for over three three years now babe yeah we've had it in a couple of three vans we've had it in uh and it just keeps going and going and it never lets us down so let's turn this on we're currently pulling i'll show you what a sandwich press makes on the back of here again look it tells you uh 750 watts that one's a nine dollar special that's a nine dollar special there you go but if we turn it on it goes straight to um full noise and i will if you didn't know oh sorry if you didn't know the things that draw the most power in your caravan are either heating or cooling elements so heating the most cooling the second and then charging is the next right that's the thing that draws the most amps so let's have a look common loads three amps turn that on let's have a look at what it wants to go up to when we crank it in so it'll start charging up house battery there you go it's pulling 40 amps out of the battery if we have a look over here tells you the same thing it'll also show you the wattage 526 watts it's pulling out of the battery to heat that sandwich press up next one the nine dollar toaster from woolies this one kmart is it we go all out don't we do turn that one on let's have a look and up she goes 16. oh hang on no just you know you have to press this down before it works did you know that here we go go again straight up it's going to use a lot there it's going to heat 580 590. so there you go just under 600 watts and 45 amps to run that so they are power hungry but you've got to remember these appliances like you might be on for a couple of minutes to use a piece of toast right so you might use one or two percent of your battery um over those few minutes so if you've got good solar coming in that charges back up within 20 minutes you know but over the in general overnight after we use it and all that sort of thing in the morning we wake up and our battery system is around 75 percent on average that be right back yeah about right but if we use it the night before lock last night we used we've just got a thermomix as well we used that last night to cook a curry uh that pulled about on its full heating element you know i pulled about 89 amps or something while it was getting up the temp and then when it got back down it was only using 20 or 30 amps so it used a fair bit of battery power last night about 10 of our system to cook our curry which took about 30 minutes so which was wide this morning we were down around 65 percent now we're at 59. there you go so that's 590 watts steady for that toaster flick him off now the big one which a lot of ladies might want to know about is the hair dryer special kmart special now you're probably it's going to be variable as to what fan speed it's on and what heat it's on so i'll put it on the hottest setting at the highest fan speed and we'll plug it in oh mate i'd do a hair for her you know give her a blow wave now and then crank it on let's have a look look at that smashing it oh 21 21 2160 watts that's a lot eight if we have a look here it'll be how many answers going out 171 amps 171 amps to run this your hair dryer it once a week for like three minutes uh there you go we'll turn it off so um that goes to show if you haven't got a big battery system you probably don't want to let the misses carry your hair dryer because that's a lot of power you wouldn't want to use that for too long but again i don't know how long does it take you to do your hair a couple minutes a couple of minutes yeah a little bit if i don't know if you can hear this but oh it's just going off when you start working this system it's got some thermofans in it as well so once it starts cranking and pulling heavy loads like that the fans kick in to keep everything cool here we go next one this one our induction cooker i don't know how many people we've had thousands of questions of this thing over the years we mainly well we used to always use it in the ute now we use it in here a lot because we've got the battery system to handle it the more we use this the less gas we use right um and we also we put it down here and the kids make scrambled eggs and pancakes on it all the time yeah it's down low and it's also it's not hot even when you're cooking you take that off it's hot to touch but it's not going to burn you like a hot pan on a gas stove right so i'll plug it into this one and show you the good thing about these is they're variable so it's a 2000 watt induction cooker and they're safe they will not turn on unless you've got an induction capable pot on top so it'll register that put this on turn it on go straight to 300 watts and then it should tell you it should transfer exactly what's on this to over here so let's see it build up because i've got this set at 1300 if you have a look babe yeah down here there's 1300 watts let's just crank it up to 2000 that's the highest setting to like boil water and see what it pulls out of the battery it also might take more if it's um if it's got food in it and stuff so there you go it's only pulling 1320 watts but if we have a look 101 amps 101 amps out of the battery so you don't want to be pulling that for too long yeah i mean and who does that only takes two minutes to boil water whenever we're cooking the highest setting is usually about 1300 to 1600 watts and uh you're only using it for five or six minutes so there you go that's uh induction cooker that was only 59 bucks off ebay about three years ago it's been one of our best purchases ever oh yeah harris scarf sorry but yeah you can get them on ebay just look up inabella 2000 watt cooktop all right now big one everyone loves coffee everyone loves the coffee let's plug the coffee machine in i need a bit of water this is an espresso essenza mini we're just about to get a new one but it will be the same machine it's been a killer we've had it for a couple years but i think it's started to get a bit um scaly and gross yeah the coffee's just not as good as it used to be so we plug that in i'll just turn that on you gotta let it heat up for a second we really want a normal coffee machine but um we don't have the bench space we don't have the space and i want it to fit in here and you can't find one small enough and i might just um if we're doing it do you want another coffee deer yeah if we're doing it i'll just make you another coffee so we keep our um where's the milk frother jug there it is the same thing here it's like a fiddly one i think is that woolies yeah yeah we've had that for years you just put your milk thing in there we never froth our milk anymore you just use it as a milk heater so there you go a bit of extra info for you this is where we store all the soy milk and almond milk i've got little hidey holes over here in this vienna little storage compartments it's great so let's have a look i'll show you what the milk frother pulls um yeah about that much soy milk for the squeeze and if we turn this on and it only takes a few minutes too but we press our button it beeps and again it's a heating element so it does use a bit of power you see straight away it's pulling 25 amps out of the battery uh which is going to be 314 watts there you go so it says 500 watts on the back of it but that's always like the peak power usage so i found that they put a bit of a safety margin in there um just to cover their own bums i think but there you go it's pulling there it's getting up there now 400 watts sort of cycling to heat the milk and it's using up to 25 amps and 400 watts to use a milk frother right i'll let that keep going and we'll get a coffee going for the miso so she loves her little cup here anyway run one through always ask me about this actually i'll just turn it off just turn mate she's a clever one all right let's see what it takes to pull a shot of coffee out of this machine i've got a pot in there let's press the button away we go it is cranking look at that up to about 1200 watts at peak and 91.7 amps at peak as well so like i said it only uses the most power when it's heating look at that now it's done the heating part and it's pushing through it's only pulling 13 amps so yeah you'd probably want a 2 000 watt inverter to be able to run a coffee machine successfully and then we'll finish the milk off for dale and then i'll serve it up for her thank you no worries it's valentine's day so everything's for you today all right um that's going to be all our appliances in the kitchen right which we mainly use i'll now once the coffee's done i'll turn the aircon on and show you what it pulls now we get a lot of questions about the aircon how long does it last can you run it all day that's not why we did that it's not what we've ever used it for it is a power hungry device especially where you can use it on reverse cycle to heat in the morning and that pulls heaps when you first start it up pull 60 to 70 amps right now you think about it we've got a 400 amp battery pack what's um 60 times 4 is 20 what's that 240 so there's four hours of usage would be 240 amps your battery gone five hours of usage would be 300 amps your battery gone now you don't want to go and use all your battery power just to run the aircon because then what are you going to do to use anything else right so we get about if we wanted to run it for long term we'd get three to four hours out of it on a good day with full solar that 30 amps coming in would offset it so you'd get five to six hours usage but we don't need that right what we use it for is on a really hot stinking day middle of summer or whatever or just in a free camp somewhere we pull up at the end of the day we get in here and go oh it's disgusting we put that on for an hour or so with everything shut it cools the van down we turn it off we put on our sirocco fans so if you spin around bet well there's one above her head and there's this one here these are the best fan you will ever find they use stuff all power they're quiet they rotate in every which way they've got sleep timers on them they've got three speeds don't get white don't get white get black yeah you don't have to clean them as often um but yeah so i'll show you in a minute but it they are power hungry and you don't want to to be able to set up a system to run an aircon full-time mate you'd probably need at least a thousand watts of solar on the roof and a good 600 watts of lithium so another 200 amps or 600 amps sorry another 200 plus than what we've got like it's just i don't see i think if you wanted to run it full time you're far better off getting a generator okay in my opinion because otherwise you just got a huge system built just to run an aircon if you like us and you're following the seasons you shouldn't really need to use it no like we probably use that more of a heater on super cold mornings that are unexpected you know and then it's good because you might use it for an hour in the morning get out of bed and then you drive for that day and you charge your battery back up so it works really well like that as we don't have a diesel heater sweet well i just want to quickly show you i've changed clothes because i forgot to do this the other day but i want to show you what the aircon pulls right so super hot day today about 32 outside nice and warm up here i've got the aircon on the lowest setting 16 degrees on the icy cool and uh full fan speed now we'll swing over here the earpro is going to tell us that we're only using 15 amps of our battery power which we are so that's 15 amps just to run the aircon but you know why it's because we've got a heap of solar coming in look at that 15.1 and 16. so we've got 31 amps of solar coming in which is offsetting this so normally they'd be pulling 46 amps which is about right so the aircon normally once it's cooled down to its cycle around anywhere from that 45 to 55 amps is what the aircon will pull now that's a dometic harrier other aircons will pull more or less but i think in general terms the only two you'd want to be able to run off an inverter from my knowledge are the truma aventa and the dometa carrier happy days that's the aircon um coffee's ready i'll pull that in a second but the fridge right let's talk about fridges we get a lot of questions back about should i get a three-way fridge or a compressor fridge right now i'd like to tell you is my take or my differences between the two so a three-way fridge is just that it runs on three types of energy so runs on gas runs on 240 and it also runs on 12 volt but only when you're hooked up to the car now three-way fridge is really inefficient on 12 volt so you don't want to be running it off your batteries when you're stopped which is why they generally there'll be a fridge switch which will only let you use 12 volt power in a three-way while you're towing so it runs it off there right off gas they're super efficient and they work really well but they use a lot of gas in hot weather and in 240 volt they work sweet so if anyone's planning your van build if the type of travel you're going to do is mainly caravan parks and not too many free camping stays i would recommend getting a three-way fridge because you're not gonna you'll always be plugged into 240 volt power and the odd time you do go away you can run it on gas and they work really well the reason we don't we have a compressor fridge is because they're suited to run only on 240 volt and 12 volt but they are really efficient on 12 volt power right but you still have to have a good system to run it because they are a constant load it you know your fridge especially with kids it's getting open and shut all the time we're in hot weather the fridge runs a lot and it pulls probably five to six amps most of the time so you're going to use probably 50 to 60 amps a day to run a compressor fridge so you need to have solar and you need to have a battery bank big enough to support a compressor fridge but for us it's gold because we don't use any gas we do that much free camping if we had a gas fridge it'd be forever filling gas bottles and it would be a pain in the bum so there you go that's my take on three-way verse compressor fridges for off-grid systems compressors that go all right here you go dear here's your coffee thanks dog hey uh and we'll just about wrap this up i reckon ah there you go show everyone have a sip it's probably stinking hot don't burn your mouth yeah i do love coffee all right um what else we got babe i don't want to miss anything hold the microwave oh yeah i'll show you actually let's do that let's just go start put it on 70 watts it's pulling they're pretty good hey on the microwave there's 296 560 800 1100 so it's peaked out at about 1190 1200 and um in amps it'll be pulling 92 amps 93 amps so there you go you'd probably want a 2 000 watt inverter to run uh your microwave as well all right that's our off-grid battery system now talk about price and costing um it's a lot of money i'm not going to lie to you and if you're not going to use it then i wouldn't recommend going to get it now for the system in this van is depending on a few little components of that you're going to be anywhere between 14 to 20 grand now uh for the if you start at the 14 grand sort of set up we know from experience that we've recouped that cost in 12 months of travel by not staying and paying for caravan park site fees right especially with kids can be upwards of 70 85 a night for kids we can go down the road stay in a free camp in a bush camp like we are now for nothing and still use all our appliances and be happy well in 2016 what do we spend on caravan park thirteen thousand dollars so and that was four years ago and we barely paid for kids that's right so it's gone up a lot since then so if we stayed in that same which was probably about 75 caravan parks 25 free in national parks if we did that same trip now it'll probably cost us closer to 20 grand just in park fees and stuff so and honestly it's not just the money it's about the enjoying the lifestyle i know i'll spin it around but how much more do you enjoy caravanning just having creature comforts oh 100 i think that's why i've lasted on the road for five years in all honesty yeah yeah just being able to dry my hair off at night run the toaster run my coffee machine um and to have those luxuries where you're in a free camp overlooking the ocean yeah totally worth it makes it an hour it's good peace of mind when you know you're pretty much saving money along the way anyway and hopefully this might convince you your wife to go traveling australia it would definitely help mate i think if they know they can run their thermomix like you've got now yeah and bring along their stuff and do their cooking and they can even run a sewing machine or anything like that you know yeah but um well worth the money it is it also i'll tell you now some of our best probably our top 10 best places and best experiences around the country have all been in free camps and bush camps and places that are hard to get to and we've enjoyed them because we've got creatures we've got photos our favorite photos on the ball here are from free camps look at this one oh this one here yeah cate range national park and james price point yeah oh and all the rooms these were all free camping spots and they're my favorite photos in our caravan and we had appliances able to work able to work killer all right all right it's my turn for a coffee i just want to show you one last thing is our little kettle it's a t-fal mini and the sticker on the bottom of that says 2200 watts hey tea fell that's what it is oh is it oh god i'm sorry tomato tomato yeah well see what i'm going to live with oh yeah hey um right i hit the go button there on the kettle that turn on yeah um yes that's the red ball came on yeah don't mind the disgusting exactly this is a really good hot tip actually because it's only half a liter yeah no it's not it's point eight sorry point eight you know you could be tomato we're lucky to ever put any more than half a liter in it for a couple of us uh here we go she's cranking uh let's have a look it's on it's on it's pulling 2 000 watts there you go let's have a look over here uh yeah 157 amps plus the washing machine's on as well so there you go no drummers pulling a kettle but you'd want oh i reckon you'd probably want a 2600 watt inverter to pull a kettle yeah because 2000 might be just on the limit got some black shoes i don't know do you want some black shoes just a few you know why do we buy black shoes though dude because when you hit the pilbara and the kimberley and that pinned and red dirt stains anything other than black even this stuff out here it's like that black bit of sand and stuff like that it doesn't matter where you are they get filth or black shoes black shoes especially for the kids right and the last thing i want to show you is how the system looks after itself so the safeties it will cut out if you try and pull too much current by using lots of appliances right so here we go i've got the milk frother down here i'm going to turn that on i've got the air con still running off the inverter all right and you come over here it's pulling 76 amps off the battery now now i reckon this one might be the clincher i'll start the kettle up like that we're pulling 290 amps out of the battery uh it's probably going to want oh there you go look at that we're pulling 3000 over 3000 watts out of the battery system it's still going what else can we put on i reckon if we throw the hot water heater on that'll trip it over so we'll put that on still on put the coffee machine on oh my god it's still running it's at the moment it's just gone there it goes so it took it took us putting all those appliances on and it peaked at about 500 watts on the epro and you hear that beeping there you go that's the alarm it'll shut itself down now there's no oh like really hard way to reset it all you do is press and hold the inverter combi control to turn it off a couple of seconds make sure all your stuff's turned off otherwise it'll instantly try and trip it again but uh and the kettle off then all you have to do is press the button again it beeps turns back on and away we go it's back to normal so it's just like pretty much like an rcd or a safety switch in your house the inverter combi's got the same thing so it doesn't matter if you overdo it it'll just turn off and say too much man and you reset it and your happy days i'm surprised that's it that was huge ben hey four and a half thousand what's it pulled right well i think i'm going to sign off there while i make my coffee this is my new little thing one of these wakako i think that's how you say it there you'd know when you're being an english expert i just burnt my hand ah fudge not good at that anyway i'm really liking this you can buy whatever coffee you want and it's just a little bit labor-intensive if you've got to plunge yourself right there you go anyway off-topic up here dear hope you enjoyed that i hope you got some good info out about it i'm going to leave a heap of links in the video description and make sure you hit the one that goes to the landing page and you can enter our competition and you might be lucky enough to win the fridge mate have a crx 85 or a crx 110 in your next touring rig or your van or your pop top whatever remember to check out the codes too save yourself with your cash right eye catches bon appetit is that what you say for coffee [Music] daisy's bloomin sundress swaying in the breeze

Channel: Trip In A Van - RoadTrip Australia Series

Views: 122,586

Rating: 4.9279575 out of 5

Keywords: OFF GRID, BATTERY POWER, CARAVAN, LITHIUM BATTERY, OFFROAD, TRAVEL, BIG LAP, OFF GRID POWER, ROADTRIP, TRIP IN A VAN, VANLIFE, NOMAD, FREE CAMPING, WILD CAMPING

Id: Uxc7fBvHDtQ

Length: 38min 31sec (2311 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021