Off Grid RV AC 🥵 How Long Will My RV Air Conditioner Last in Desert Heat 🔥 Full Time RV Living

In today's video, we're going put my Volta power system to the test running the RV AC in a hundred degree desert weather. Whatt is going on youtube greetings from Nellis Air Force base in Henderson nevada. If you're not familiar with that it's pretty close to las vegas nevada about 15 miles outside of vegas and it's september and it's really really hot here today it's supposed to get up over a hundred degrees so i figured this was the perfect opportunity to test my volta power system under extreme conditions my plan is to run the RV air conditioning system on nothing but battery power in extreme hot weather to see how long it'll last my plan is to give you an update every hour or so letting you know the temperature outside the temperature in the vehicle and how much power i have left i've seen a lot of videos testing acs but i haven't seen any testing in extreme hot weather like this so this should be pretty fun okay so the first thing i'm gonna do is unhook the power system here on my rig all right so the power is unhooked it is 8 21 in the morning and it is currently 85 degrees hopefully you can see that and let's go in the van and see how everything's going i've already got the ac on in the van so let's go in there and check on the power system check on the ac and do a couple little modifications to make sure it stays cool in my van during this hot weather okay so like i mentioned my ac is already running we'll go ahead and look at the volta power system so right now it is at 100 if you're not familiar with the volta power system let me explain it as best as i know so i have 11 600 watts of power volta doesn't really talk in amps i know most people want to know how many amps do i have but they say that's a little bit dis ingenuous because 100 amps and one battery is going to have a different amount of power than 100 amps in another battery so they like to talk in terms of watts so this volta system has 11 600 watts of power this is automotive lithium it's in a box underneath my van there's different modules in it since i have the national park edition my volta system has all four modules so i have the max you can get in a winnebago travado at least okay so let me talk about this little gauge here that i showed you a minute ago so this is different than a lot of power systems most power systems you look at the voltage to see how much battery life your battery has and you kind of gotta guess with the volta system they made it just like a fuel gauge zero percent is empty a hundred percent is full right now you'll see there's a green light when it gets down to a lower percentage it goes to a yellow light and when it gets down to like a critical stage when you need to recharge your batteries it goes to a red light my system is built with an auto start i have that off now so we can really test this battery but normally if this drops below 10 percent my vehicle will auto start i have an under the hood generator which is really just a second alternator the van will idle at about 1500 rpms and charge this thing up 40 to 50 percent in about an hour so that's pretty cool okay like i mentioned it's almost 8 30 and it's 85 degrees here right now we're scheduled to get up to about 101 102 degrees okay so now we're going to talk about the air conditioning unit i have the coleman mach 10 the latest coleman air conditioner that's supposed to be quieter than the previous ones and more energy efficient i currently have it set at low cool but if it gets above 78 degrees then i'm gonna switch it to high cool i can tell you from my own experience being here in nevada for a couple days suffering through 103 heat that i'm definitely going to have to turn this thing to high cool which is going to be a bigger draw on the battery but this is real life this is a real scenario so i'm gonna run it like i would normally in a real scenario okay speaking of that i'm gonna go ahead and set up my coach for extreme heat conditions so i can make sure it stays as cool as possible here in my travato okay so one of the first things i'm going to do is i'm going to shut the bathroom door to keep the ac in this part of the coach it actually gets pretty hot back here and if i leave these doors open it's much harder for my ac to keep the part of the coach that i stay in most often cool okay so the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to shut all the shades in here make it kind of dark to try to keep the sun from beating down on my rig it's 8 30 now but about 10 o'clock that sun's gonna be right outside of this side of my rig and it's going to be beating hard on my black colored rig all right so now all the shades are shut including my front shades but i want to show you something really quick so i have these really cool um window covers they're magnetic they're made by van made gear i'm not sponsored by them but i actually love these things but i kind of made a mistake when i ordered them i had the outside done in black which isn't a smart idea this front cab area gets really really hot and this black attracts the sun so my solution for it is i put this lighter color on the outside and i just swap which side they're on it doesn't hold as well as it would being used the correct way but it makes it a little bit cooler up here in this front cab area so every navy sailor that goes on board a ship is a trained firefighter we go to firefighting school one of the things you learn to contain smoke are these things called smoke blankets well i'm going to create my own version of a smoke blanket but my goal is to keep out the heat i mentioned before this area gets really really hot so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to use one of my wool blankets here that everyone kind of makes fun of me for why would you sleep with wool blankets i was in the military for 20 years um these things are kind of like you know linus's little blanket that he had in charlie brown i just i really feel comfortable in these things and at home so that's what i'm gonna do i'm going to set this blanket up over this area to keep this heat out of the main area all right so now i've got my little heat barrier up the ac actually shut off while i was doing that so let me go ahead and turn it back on because i want it to stay on the whole time i'm doing this so my plan for this experiment is to leave the ac running the whole time because in this temperature that's what i normally do and i'm trying to simulate exactly what i do just like putting up this curtain that's exactly what i do so i really i want to test that volta system in my own real life situation and let you know how it works out so this ac is going to be on the whole time now if you don't want it on the whole time you can probably make the battery last longer by having it on auto and putting it to whatever temperature is comfortable for you this is just my test understand that it's going to be running the whole time so it's going to eat up the power from the battery much quicker than if you use the auto version of the ac all right so now we're set up now we just wait around like i said i'll check in about every hour on the hour so right now it is 8 42 and it is 85 or 86 degrees so it's 8 42 and it's 86 degrees out i'll check back in at nine o'clock and then every hour on the hour until we exhaust this volta battery system so i figured i'd share something with you i mentioned this in the video i did with scott a lot of times i like to just lay in bed and work and being in this hot desert climate where it's miserable to go outside this actually works really well for me i have this really cool like bamboo thing here so i can just sit here and work but it's almost nine o'clock so let's get up and check the volta system it's only been like 20 minutes or so since we started this little experiment but uh as you can see the volta system is going down it's at about 90 percent so we lost 10 in about 20 minutes now that might sound a little alarming but you usually lose a lot in the beginning much quicker once it gets past that 80 percent mark it slows down a little i'm not sure what causes that but yeah so we're at 90 percent at it's 87 degrees and it's 8 59 on my clock all right so that's the nine o'clock update i'm going to check back in at 10 but as you can see it's at about 90 percent here at nine o'clock so should we be worried i don't know i just realized i forgot to mention the amount of solar i have on this rig because that contributes to the battery system and it's something you should know about so real quick let's go hop on top of my roof all right so here we are on top of my roof as you can see i've got one big solar panel here and one smaller solar panel back there i have a total i think of 320 on the roof so not a whole lot going in solar wise but it is really bright here in the desert so these things are definitely soaking up the sun and as you can see and here my ac is on and running so you know i'm not pulling any funny business here i do have a portable 90 watt solar panel but it's really bulky and heavy and i don't really use it that often that's why i'm not using it today i wanted to give you a realistic look on you know how i use my volta power system okay it's almost 10 am let's go check and see where we're at oh it's 10 o'clock so it's 91 degrees hopefully you can see that all right so it's 10 o'clock so it's been about an hour and what 20 hour and 30 minutes and currently we're at 80 percent here on the volta i'm still in local it's actually pretty cold in here i almost put a sweater on uh because it's so cold it says it's 70 degrees on the ac but it seems much cooler in here so like i said that thing isn't that accurate it's only accurate like right next to the ac but standing there and working in the cold air it's definitely below 70. so here we are 10 o'clock we still got 80 percent of our volta left and it's getting hotter though it's in the 90s now i'm going a little stir crazy here in the van so i think i'm gonna go for a little walk and i'll show you around this military campground that i'm staying at and then we'll come back at 11 o'clock and see where we're at temperature wise in the van okay so my door's shut the hd is still running as you can see it's super hot sun's actually right there so hopefully this shot's not too blacked out as i walk around this park but it's a really cool military campground because i'm retired military i have access to all the military campgrounds to camp at and this is one of the better ones it's on an air force base near vegas and it's only 20 dollars a night which is crazy so let me just show you some of the amenities here so over here is a bathroom and a laundry there a bunch of these strategically placed throughout this park yeah so there is a laundry room in here which is really cool and it's free unlike most laundry rooms and on this side we have the male bathroom on the other side is the female bathroom make sure there's nobody in here nope there's not so it's pretty cool there's showers a lot of rv parks charge for their showers but on these military bases they never do there's also toilet stalls in each one and then the sinks so yeah the bathrooms are set up really really nice and as you can see there's just a bunch of a bunch of rv spots here all these spots here come with electric hookups water and sewer there's also a dump station that's free to use at the beginning of the park if you want to but you really don't need to do that if you get a spot and like i said they're only 22 a night i think i said 20 earlier but they're 22 a night for these spots and there's a couple other things in the park that i'll show you but really it's just a quiet and peaceful place to camp a lot of rv parks aren't really dog friendly but this one is most military rv parks are dog friendly so there's just like walking paths as you can see here and all over the place are these little dog plastic bags so you can pick up their poo areas i mean they're all over the place there's probably more of those than there are rv parking spots so it's a really dog friendly parking spot but i'll take you to another part of the park that's pretty kid-friendly now i don't have kids i like to go to places where there are fewer kids i'm not anti-kid but i just like being surrounded by adults and a lot of the military rv parks especially during the week are mostly adults which is nice on the weekends of course the campers come in they bring their kids but most of the people that are on these bases during the week are retired military like me most of them are a little bit older than me and so their kids are grown and they're not with them they're just traveling one more thing to show you real quick they have these premium spots that are surrounded by vegetation and they're really cool so i'll show you one of them really quick i'm not in a premium spot i think they're like six dollars more a night and i just don't you know want to pay the extra cost for it i'm fine in the spot i'm in but here is a look at the premium spot you can see all this vegetation here which is really cool it's the weekend so i'm actually really surprised there are no kids here but you have this little playground area and then right over there uh is the basketball court but i'm kind of a big kid so i'm going to jump on this swing set here real quick when i was a kid i used to get as high as i could go and then i would jump off this but i'd probably kill myself if i tried this and i'm not even going to show you me try to stop this swing because i'll probably fall in my face so let's go back to the rig and see how the power system's doing um we're getting close to 11 a.m all right so it is 11 o'clock here it's 95 degrees and it's still really cool in here which is great but obviously it's getting hot outside the sun is starting to beat down on the van i think it is 73 degrees in here right now but it feels cooler than that like i mentioned before this thermometer is not very accurate to be honest with you but let's check out the volta system here so we are currently at 70 percent so yeah i think what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna check in every two hours now so it's 11 p.m now i'm going to check back in with you at 1 pm and then continue on every two hours from that point on so this video doesn't run too long you'll still get to see how long this volta lasts but every hour seems a little bit repetitive okay so everyone's always curious about what i eat in my van for whatever reason people are concerned i'm not eating or i'm eating unhealthy so i figured i'd share with you um what i'm gonna eat for lunch today so i usually make wraps but since i'm on this base food is really affordable pre-made food so i went ahead and got some wraps so today for lunch i'm gonna eat a chicken caesar wrap so pretty simple stuff not rocket science here but i figured i'd let all of you know that i eat pretty healthy even though i don't cook very much but yeah so all i have to do to prepare this is take it out of the packaging throw the packaging away and now i have a chicken caesar sandwich i'll probably throw some popcorn here some white cheddar popcorn and there a healthy little lunch so mom and anybody else that's worried about me not eating out here or eating unhealthy i think i eat fairly healthy so this is a typical lunch for me all right so let me try this real quick and see if it's as good as my chicken caesar wraps it's not too bad mine are usually mine usually tastes a little bit more fresh because they haven't been sitting in a refrigerator but this is actually not too bad so it's almost noon now i'm gonna do another update in an hour but it'll seem seamless to you so let's jump over to the 1pm update all right so it's one o'clock now and as you see it is 98 degrees and let's check our volta it looks like we're right at 50 percent so we lost a bit it's getting hotter out it's getting a little hotter in the rig it's like 77 degrees now according to the thermometer on there so i'm probably gonna turn it up to high cool which might start eating the battery a little quicker so that's where we're at see you in another two hours all right so it just hit 3 p.m and it's 99 degrees outside we might avoid 100 today i don't know but i want to show you something real quick before i show you how much battery life is left i am currently hooked up to city water which means i have a hose directly from a ground faucet that runs into my city fill line which means the water that i'm using in here is pulled out of there instead of out of my fresh water tank but the water is so hot i wish i had a temperature gauge this water is coming straight out of the pipes here in nevada and it's gotta be 110 115 degrees i mean it almost hurts to use i was doing some dishes here and i was i was like holy cow did i leave my heater on or something um i didn't leave my heater on it's just so hot outside that the it doesn't matter how long i let it run either it stays steaming hot it's kind of crazy actually but let me show you so like i said it's 3 p.m so we've been running this since about 8 40 this morning not hooked up and we're currently at around 30 so we've been running for a while but at some point this is going to shut itself off i don't think it'll be before our next update at 5 p.m but we'll see if it gets down to where it's going to shut itself down i'll make sure i do an update before that happens see you at 5 pm okay so it is 5 p.m it is 98 degrees outside it did spike up to 100 but just briefly um but it's been pretty hot all day in the high 90s for sure we are now at about five percent on volta you'll see it's red so that means that the system at some point will shut down it's probably got probably another 30 minutes left so i've made it about eight to nine hours on one battery charge in almost a hundred degree desert weather which i think is pretty impressive normally what would happen if i had the auto start system on it would engage when this got below 10 percent and the engine would start and it would uh rev up to 1500 rpms and it would cycle back and forth from zero to fifteen hundred for about an hour and it would charge this battery up to about forty to fifty percent so i'd get another four four and a half hours of ac time and then when it fell to ten percent it would do the same thing again and just keep going until i got down to a quarter of a tank and then it won't cycle through anymore so as you can see i could run this ac for days on a full tank of gas if that's a test you'd like to see me do make sure you comment below i didn't do it today because i don't want to hang out in my van for days doing updates every two three four hours i want to get out and explore the places i am in i've kind of been stuck in my van today doing this video but real quick i'm going to go plug in my van so we can get that charge going back up again as you can see it is super super bright out here and it's still pretty warm as well yeah i'm really really impressed with the volta system i i've i mean the biggest reason i bought this travato was for the volta system and i don't really need to run my ac all the time in most of the places i go but it's nice to have that kind of power this video kind of shows you how much power this thing really has you can run that ac for eight to nine hours on a full charge in a hundred degree weather that's just nuts and if the auto system kicks in then you can run it for days um anyway that's my video today if you enjoyed this video make sure you hit that thumbs up button i'd really appreciate it it helps more people find the video that's the way the youtube algorithm works and if you like this type of content make sure you hit that subscribe button see you next week you

Channel: 30 And A Wake Up

Views: 99,143

Keywords: RV air conditioner, RV ac, Air conditioner, van air conditioner, van life, van, van conversion, winnebago, winnebago travato, travato, rv air conditioning, ac, rv living, coleman mach 10 ndq, camper, rv air, living in a van, camper van, vanlife, full time rv living, rv living full time, rv life, rv, campervan, tiny house, #vanlife, rv travel, tiny house on wheels, full time rv, rving, living in an rv, rv full time, full time rving, rv lifestyle, rv camping, camping, travel

Id: e-cDqvRi9Qs

Length: 27min 5sec (1625 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020