Folding Camper | Determining Your RV Power Consumption

Determining Your RV Power Consumption

Posted on May 21, 2010
Filed Under Camper Supplies, Camping Equipment | Leave a Comment

Posted by Guest Author

When I purchased my first RV I was excited and my wife and I immediately headed out to the woods for our first camping trip. The plan was to camp out for three days. The first night, my wife and I had a blast and stayed up late drinking vino and playing cards. We were running the lights, playing the radio and were oblivious to anything that could go wrong. The following morning when we woke up, we reached for a cold drink from the refrigerator and realized that the refrigerator was no longer working. Upon further inspection we realized that none of the lights, CO2 detector or anything else that relied on the RV battery was functional. My immediate reaction was that we must have purchased a lemon and I was furious.

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We packed up that morning and immediately headed back to the place where we had purchased the RV. When I pulled into the parking lot the man who sold us the RV saw me and immediately walked over to see what was up. I told him that we had been camping overnight and that everything died and that we must have been sold a lemon. He immediately had a mechanic come out to take a look and he promptly determined that we had drained our battery. Thus began my education on RV power consumption, proper RV battery sizing, and alternative energy for RVs.

Our RV had a single battery installed. What I did not realize was that this was woefully inadequate. The reason that I did not realize this was because I had no idea how to determine how much power I needed vs. what I actually had available in a single battery. Understanding how much power you need takes some time to calculate and is a function of how many DC amps each electrical item in your RV is using, times the number of hours they will be used. For instance if your refrigerator is using 1 Amp per hour and you plan to run it for 24 hours, you need a battery that can supply 24 Amp Hours of power. That is why you often see deep cycle batteries used in RVs rated in Amp Hours. However, it gets even more complicated since you should never run a battery below 50% of capacity. Additionally, the refrigerator is not the only item drawing power. How about the lights, radio, CO2 detector, etc? These questions apply not only for rv’s, but for campers, pop-up trailers, tent trailers and folding campers.

When I took a year off to travel across country and purchased my second RV, things got even more complicated. I wanted to install an inverter and use several AC appliances such as a TV, satellite dish, internet satellite dish, laptop computer, etc. Since the inverter ran off of the battery bank and converted DC into AC power, I had to have a very good understating of how much power I needed so that I could not only size the battery bank appropriately, but also the inverter, and the solar panels that I was going to use to recharge the batteries daily. Converting DC into AC added a whole new dimension and set of calculations to the problem. Fortunately, it is not a difficult as it seems if you can find all the information you need in one place.

Although I was able to find information in various places on the web, I could not find it all in one place. That is why I created a website to document my install for others to learn from. If you are interested in learning how to calculate your RV power consumption needs, want to learn about using RV solar panels, want to know more about RV batteries and inverters, then visit us at http://www.solarrvpanels.com/.

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