help please - 1984 Jayco Dove Solar Hookup

Hi Everyone,

I've just purchased a pretty sweet little Jayco Dove 1984 in good nic. Someone was also nice enough to get me some solar panels with a controller for our engagement present too so now i'm looking at solar. .

I'm going to see an installer tomorrow and i need to tell them what i want. I'm torn between getting them to hookup the solar panel & controller to a Ritard 120amp hour battery which will simply power the 12v lights and give me a couple of 12v plugs. I've been advised against hooking it up to the fridge because it'll flatten the battery in no time and isn't worth it.

So that's option 1. Option 2 would involve hooking up an inverter. We are mad coffee fans and would love to be able to run the coffee machine for 10mins a day (max) & also charge laptops and run various other devices for short times. The coffee machine draws 1500w so i'm tossing up between these 2 inverters.


$899 - http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=MI5260&form=CAT2&SUBCATID=1002#3

$839 (1500w) - http://www.sinergex.com/products/puresine.html

The one from jaycar says it's a charger as well as an inverter so does that mean when the caravan is hooked up to 240v it will charge the battery? This would be handy to have another option to solar

the other one doesn't have that functionality so i'm curious as to which one would be better.

Now i understand the other way to hook it up would be to have a henderson plug from my car to the caravan to charge the batter while driving but i'm changing cars in 6 months so want to add this on later.

So can someone suggest the best way to instruct an installer to hook this up and give me any gotchas i should ask them for tomorrow?