I know finally! December has been an extremely busy month, so lets just recap as we are at the 22nd of December already. Six new lithium 100 amp/hour batteries, a 3000 watt hybrid inverter/charger, and a new battery monitoring system. Doesn’t sound like much until you throw in the fact that we moved the location of our battery bank, had to make all the new cables, added a new 400 amp fuse, a battery cut off switch, and oh yeah we had to order all these components and have them shipped from all across the states, any where from Maine to California, and were shipped by UPS, FedEx, and USPS, from a dozen different suppliers, so I’m thinking it could be as much miracle as good planning…just saying.

So just what exactly have we accomplished? I mean besides spending a ridiculous amount of money! Well let me try and explain just what we were trying to accomplish, at the end of the day…we wanted to be able to dry camp without it being a nightmare of calculations, we wanted to have all of our creature comforts, TV, BlueRay, iPads, phones without doing a lot of extra planning. We wanted to travel without resetting every electric clock on board every day, we wanted to be warm on cold nights and to have the ability not to worry whether we were further damaging our battery bank.

So putting it simple we had a lot of wants…here is what we got…we now have the ability to boondock with all our comforts, the inverter stays on all night as I used to have to shut it down the old inverter every night when we went to bed, we now have no fear of not getting our batteries topped off every day as the lithium are not as sensitive to being fully charged, and no more having to reset the microwave clock every morning. We can now run our microwave for what ever time we need to without fear of being out of power before morning, small things but still important to us. We were awoken way too many mornings to low voltage alarms on the smoke detectors, because the coach batteries were too low, I can honestly say I’m sleeping better at night knowing we are going to be ok.

I have tested the assist mode on the inverter and it is such a great feature, a couple of quick adjustments and I can limit the power drawn from the shore power connection, it can be adjusted as low as five amps of power, so any demand more than that is picked up by the batteries. Sounds pretty minor until you kick off the breaker at 11 o’clock at night and don’t want to bother anyone till morning. You see the old inverter would always try to recharge the battery bank as soon as we plugged in, so if the batteries were discharged which they always were it would use almost all the available power to charge the batteries while this new inverter only uses surplus power to recharge, doesn’t sound like a big deal but it actually is.

Our next ten days or so will be spent testing our new system, to see what it can do, how long our batteries can carry us, and of course the next big question will our solar have the ability to keep us recharged? Or will we need to add some more panels, we should know by the time we get to Quartzsite near the end of January, but either way our winter of boondocking will be a lot easier…just saying.

It’s 5:40 on Saturday morning, we have been running on our new lithium batteries since 4 o’clock yesterday, the only thing we have done different is that we ran the boiler overnight for some heat and to maintain hot water. So I left the old inverter on all night supplying power to cover our 120 volt requirements. So I watched television until 10 o’clock last night, the satellite receiver recorded a number of items overnight for later viewing, the microwave clock, the clock on the Bose Wave still on, and no need to reset this morning, my phone charged overnight, the only difference overnight than the last few nights, was no 900 watt electric heater and because the coach refrigerator is not on a circuit that the inverter energizes it is running on propane.

So what are the numbers, this is why we have spent all this money for lithium…so the sun set at about 5:30 last night and sunrise is 7:20 today, so we have an hour and a half before any sun will hit the panels, the boiler is set to keep the coach at 60 or 14 degrees, and our overnight temperature was 49 or 9 degrees so not too chilly. The battery voltage is 12.9 volts, now to put that into perspective our old battery bank would have started at dusk last evening at 12.6 volts and without the inverter on overnight would have been 12.0 or less this morning. While I presently have no way of knowing the power draw at any given time overnight, I think it’s pretty safe to calculate that if we averaged 20 amps, and we have 14 hours of darkness that our over night power draw should have been close to 280 amp/hours. When I disconnected the shore power at 4 o’clock yesterday the battery bank was at 99% or just 2 amp/hours from full, so to get a accurate as our present measuring can get at the first sign go solar production I will record the numbers.

Ok dawn is upon us, and the solar controllers just picked enough light to trigger the charging of the batteries! So here are the numbers on the control panel this morning Voltage 12.8, Battery capacity 37%, 229 amp/hours from full. Well these numbers tell me a lot, the voltage is good, with voltage like that no issues with any equipment, no alarms and such, the 37% battery capacity says that the 600 amp hours worth of batteries we purchased is the correct power supply for our needs (only have 400 amp/hours in use right now) and the 229 amp hours tells me that we averaged 16.36 amps of load for the fourteen hours, below the 20 amps I expected our average would be.

Now we get to see how well the solar can recharge our batteries, our position is not the best for producing power, we are facing north so there is no advantage to tilting our panels, and we are partially shaded by a tree. So my expectations are not high but we well see what we get, keeping in mind that we are still using power during our ten hours of sunshine.

So today I’m hoping to complete the new inverter programming, and then I can start to install, the first step will be running all the new wiring for the control panels up through the coach to the designated cabinet so stay tuned….

Day 802