Sunday, Jun 03, 2007 at 11:10
This ludicrous idea of running around with live 240 AC in a tow vehicle and/or caravan or camper trailer has been discussed here and on many other sites and as there is no way to make this set-up 100%, in an accident could not only be a danger to the vehicle’s operator but would be potentially lethal to an rescuers and the fact that it is a totally unnecessary operation in the first place, why bother.
You can easily charge a battery and run a fridge, even if the fridge is drawing 11 amps continually.
I carried out numerous tests while I was developing my gear and I had no problem charging a 200 A/H wet cell deep cycle battery from 11 volts to fully charged power off my RR’s alternator running at 14.3 at the front battery.
This took a little over 5 hours to get the bulk of the charge back into the rear battery ( around 85 to 90% charged ).
The battery was not fully charged but would only need probably 3 hours more driving to achieve a 95%+ charge state.
As stated above, the
test were being carried out to
test some electronics and there responses to different charge regimes not to
test the battery’s ability to charge but these were a spinoff the intended tests.
The initial charge current was a little over 31 amps and this was down 7.5 metres of twin 10mm2 cable through an isolator ( the reason for the tests ), two sets of 50 amp Anderson plugs, one set between the tow vehicle and trailer and the other set on the rear battery.
This set-up would not only charge any battery array in a camper trailer or caravan, to would cost a whole lot less that buying a 25 amp charger and an inverter big enough to power the battery charger.
For a lot less than a large battery charger and a larger inverter you could simply add an additional battery or two and be in a position to stop longer between charges than you could using your charger/inverter set-up and your alternator would still be able to charge all the batteries at once while you drive.
Cheers.
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505285