Mon, Feb 27, 2017
As I described in an earlier post, we fried our original pair of RV – Marine deep cycle batteries by leaving them connected to shore power over the past six months. Reason is that our power controller is ‘dumb’ in that in continuously pushes a 13.6V trickle charge into the batteries. We’ll replace the unit with a ‘smart’ one that knows when the batteries are fully charged.
We’re dry camping with our new batteries and are learning the ropes. With the sun low in the sky this time of year, our 160 watt solar panel was only able to push 70 Ahr of juice into the batteries. But we probably used over 80 Ahr. So this morning, the batteries were low at 11.1 volts. This is not sustainable so we’ll have to cut our usage even more when we reach Santispac Beach for three nights of camping later this week.
Here’s our site at La Ventana with our 160 watt solar panel opened to the sky.
DC Airstream 