Our camper can operate 100% from battery but when I built it I tossed in a group 27 deep cycle SLA I had just laying around. It's 10+ years old and while it still works I'm not sure it will work for this trip and the higher demand. Solved, installing a group 31 100ah LiFePO4 battery next week. The battery has built in BMS but this did mean I need to upgrade the on-board charger so I got a compatible 10amp automatic charger/maintainer that manages the charge cycle based on ambient temp.
Since we won't have shore power while we are out on this trip to top anything off I finally bit the bullet and picked up a portable 220 watt solar panel kit. These are 4 flexible panels in a folding kit and it only weighs 11 pounds - fantastic!
Thought process - These panels will not top off that much battery in a day but consider 50% production for only 4 hours a day, that's ~40ah. We'll probably use (we'll see) ~20ah in a day, maybe 25ah. Assume some bad weather days and we have capacity in the battery to last us days without power and can probably get close to full in 1 or 1.5 days of sun. I figure 4 or 5 days with poor sun and if we moved to conservation mode it's more like 7 or 8 days. Less than 2 days for a full "tank" Reserve capacity I call it.
Next up is a pure luxury item - a room for the awning. This will give us a private space out of the sun and bugs as needed - a place to stretch and get dressed!
Our camper has an All Top awning on it, they don't seem to make many add-ons for it so I took a gamble and purchased the ARB Touring tent room. This room has a floor, all sides open for windows with screens and the end extends out for an additional awning. I can confirm, it fits perfectly with the All Top awning and probably others.
Can't wait to try it all on and will certianly note here any interesting observations! We also picked up some USB rechargable 10" fans, these should be great and will run directly from the solar or recharge since they have built in 10,000 mah batteries that can work as a power brick for your phone.
