Battery Capacity Anxiety is not a term you might hear very often but for us fulltimers it is a well known affliction. I am just about to go off hookup for just under a week. No sun predicted and I lost my large 500Ah battery bank since last summer. I am temporarily working with a single 110Ah battery… I am off to the Peterborough Motorhome show to join the Motohome Fun Rally. I have some writing work to complete so I need my Laptop to be fully charged and to last me the whole 6 days. With the previous battery bank which lasted me 8 years I could go for almost 10 months without having a hookup. The solar panels (240Watt) and battery bank were nicely balanced to my usage. With this emergency 100Ah single battery I am well under capacity for even a 4 day run off hookup.
So the big job today was getting everything charged up, the 2 laptops, the tablet, the toothbrush, the trimmer, the 2 phones and the vans main battery.
I realised I had two of those emergency starter packs which have 2 USB ports on each of them so I got them charged up as well. Then I remembered my Dell Backup battery pack so put that on charge. I thought I had better charge up my two drills just in case anything breaks while I am away.
Crikey, I didn’t realise how many things I needed to charge. It’s been a long time since I suffered battery capacity nerves. Those years with 500AH have spoiled me…
I will need to get the 2nd and 3rd 110Ah batteries ordered before much longer as I will be going off hookup quite a bit this summer and with my usage patterns the single 110Ah battery will not do the job.
I have started a post which will cover my Electrical system as it was designed. This will explain all the components and their purpose and how they interact. I have quite a bit of time this week for writing so I hope to have a fair few posts this week on the fulltiming lifestyle.