Motorhome

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

Gas

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We use the gas for heating,  the fridge,  and water heating (for showers). We have two Calor gas bottles. Only one came with the van, a 6kg one. We found that we could just fit 13kg bottles into the van so we bought one. For some silly reason Calor will not allow you to swap a 6kg bottle for a 13kg one so we have two different sizes. Read more

Water

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Some folk don’t like drinking water from the tank so they carry bottled water with them. We carry a few bottles of tap water in the fridge for use in an emergency (like an empty tank!) or when we want a really cold drink. We are happy to drink the water from the van tank. It is British mains water which is considered safe to drink after sitting in underground pipes for weeks on end… Read more

Heating

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I think we have been very lucky with our heating. We have a Truma Ultraheat which can work of gas or mains electric. We almost always use it on gas.
There is a fan fitted to duct air into the cab or into the loo/shower but we find the convected air which comes out of the front of the heater without assistance is easily sufficient to heat the van, although in colder weather the fan helps to mitigate the layering effect. We mainly use the ducted air to warm up the air in the shower – it only takes around 5 minutes. 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

Four years later

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It’s around four years since I wrote the last article on the electrics. The mods have worked very well, we have used the van two or three times a month without any problems. But the Banner Leisure battery was starting to struggle. Sometimes we would see the lights flicker as the water pump or the loo flush motor was running. The lights have built in regulators and will dim if the voltage falls below around 12V…. 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