solar panel

When I replaced the PDU with my version I did not bother with a battery charger.  As we never had a hook up, there was no point But last week we spent a few days on a campsite – with a hook up!!! Maybe we are getting old. 

We didn’t really need it, but I reckoned on a campsite nowadays you have to pay for a hook up whether you use it or not, and so it’s best to use the site’s electricity rather than my gas for heating.  We also found out, after nine years ownership, that the hook up also heats the water. This is good but there does not seem to be any control of the water temperature and its gets very hot.
The little solar panel kept the battery charged, but I thought it would be good to be able to charge the battery conveniently from the mains. Read more

The Varta was 4 years old.  I had got the feeling it was a bit down on capacity, but it’s a bit immaterial. I managed to flatten it by leaving it for a few weeks with a light switched on.  I must have inadvertently left it on when we unpacked the van from a previous trip. Unfortunately the weather has not been good, and the solar panel with a few hours daylight per day could not compensate for the light on 24 hours per day. Read more

Back in 2014 when I first did my calculations I estimated that phones, tablets, and computers would take an average of 14AH a week while were out and about at festivals and on holidays.
Things have changed in five years.  The technology items have got more power hungry and we find that we use the van a lot to visit folk so we spend a lot of time sitting in it. So we use more power demanding technology more often – a classic double whammy. Read more

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

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

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