Our 2010 F-210X Fun Finder travel trailer is a great little camper as long as it is hooked to a power grid. Mary & I can make our on-board fresh and waste water tankage last for about a week but the single 12V battery that came with the rig gave up the ghost in a day or less when we used normal DC powered items on battery power. We replaced the OEM lights inside and outside with LEDs and reduced our battery usage for lighting by a factor of more than 10. Click the photo for a link for the ones we bought on Amazon.com – these replaced all the little peanut bulbs in the ceiling lights, night lights and the pass through light. We also found the bulbs for the refrigerator, range hood and outdoor light on Amazon as well. About 20 lights in all and we can now turn them all on and use the same battery draw as 1 or 2 of the old ones.
Renogy 200W Kit w/MPPT controller
We still could only last a couple of days so we added a second battery and doubled our staying power to 2-3 days on battery.power if we were really stingy with usage. Still nowhere near our target of a week or more. Turn on the fans or water pump and we just gobbled down the amps and sucked the batteries down in a few hours. I decided to jump into the solar power arena in a significant way just to see what we could accomplish for a reasonable investment. Research on-line at user groups and boondocking enthusiast sites led me to an off-grid 200 Watt system from Renogy in Chino, California. We added a remote meter/control box a couple of connectors to parallel our panels for best 12V operation (per Renogy tech support) and 25 feet each of Red and Black #10 stranded wire to connect everything and waited for the parade of Amazon boxes. In addition, Check Out This Article – WebDesign499 for more information.
There are lots of solar companies and kits and “Experts” and “Snake oil salespersons” in the solar power arena and you can drive yourself crazy trying to get it right. I have used a small solar setup on my boat for years but only as a trickle charger without a controller – hook it to the battery and lay it in the sun. It worked after a fashion but a 5 Watt panel without a controller will just trickle charge a battery and cook it dry if you let it – Cheap cheap!. Some fellow members on the FunFinder Owners website have done full scale AC/DC systems to run everything – Lotsa bucks! Continue reading
The system I am installing is a high quality mid range system. Read the next few entries as the project continues and see how it works!