Electrickery

Motorcycle Points Saver

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I decided to fit out my Royal Enfield Bullet with an electronic points saver.  I was happy to keep the points and the mechanical advance/retard mechanism – I really just wanted to take the load off the points and the capacitor.
The advantage is that the points will not wear although the heel of the breaker will wear as before.  ( A smear of lithium grease is probably a good idea). The points gap is not critical, other than making sure it opens at the right point. Read more

The Wee solar panel

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The solar panel is only a 10W item and mounted under the skylight. It seems to work as predicted, even better really. After a day of sunlight the leisure battery was showing 15.6V. This is what the CTEK battery charger information calls “A reconditioning charge” There cannot be much current from a 10W cell – maybe 3/4 of an amp – less than the C100 charge for a 90AH battery but a little bubbling will be happening which apparently is good to prevent stratification in the battery.
But I think I can do better.. Read more

And another leisure battery

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We have never been particularly careful when using power, but because we were aware of the limitations of the battery we found ourselves switching off lights at every opportunity.
So we gave in and bought another leisure battery. This time it was a Varta LFD90 from Battery Megastore.
We were actually living in the van at the time and had little time to research batteries but I found this site… Read more

Making a professional job

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As I have mentioned, the original system is horrendously complicated. The control panel is microprocessor controlled and gives an indication of fresh water level (very unreliable) waste water level (never worked for me at all) blown fuses (may have worked – I never blew any) as well as battery condition (useless). This means there are lots of wires in the harness that I simply don’t need. Read more

More power technicalities

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I now have the Banner battery installed and I hope to keep it for a long time. In Part 1 I described how I have added some electrics to bypass the power distribution unit thus saving lots of wasted power. In Part 2 I described what I had to do to be able to last a week on the battery and without an EHU.
Following a few trials I have had to make a couple of small modifications to the bypass circuit described in part 1 Read more

The Leisure Battery

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I’m updating this as I dig out more data. To tell the truth I’m getting a bit fed up with the lack of datasheets and the standard of the data sheets that the manufacturers put out. My theory is the rise in the popularity of solar panels means that users can actually make do with any old battery and the suppliers will sell “any old battery” as a leisure battery at inflated prices… Read more

Power Use Management

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If you always use EHU then this article is probably not a lot of use to you – although you may find the battery isolator switch very handy.
If you have a large motorhome with multiple rooms that need blown air for heating, this article will be of limited use.
If you have a small motorhome, and indulge in off site camping then some of the ideas here may be relevant to you.
Whatever – have fun. Read more