Power supply

Vermonster

Staying for the week in the GMNF.  Reaon for the hood being open on the truck is I'm powering the camper via a 1100 watt inverter off the truck battery to a battery charger on the camper.  Seems to work fine so far.  I just monitor the voltage on the truck battery.  When it gets down to 12 I start the truck for a while.  Mostly just using lights, furnace, and computer.  No water cause it's too cold.

Moderator's Note; Photo edited due to size.

Nomad

If need be, I just back my TV up to the T@B and connect the 7-pin. If I need to charge the computer I have a small 500 watt inverter hooked directly to the T@B battery.

jkjenn

It's hard to get by on solar in the NE from November until April. Glad that solution is working out for you!

Nomad

Not much camping going on in the NE those long snowy months either :-)

Vermonster

Pxl I tried the 7 pin route on our first 3 day trip and it didn't work well.  For some reason my truck won't put power through the 7pin unless it's running.  Burned almost a quarter tank of gas in a couple of days!   The inverter and charger works well because I don't have to run the truck much and the charger goes to maintenance mode when the camper battery is full up.  Worked very well for 7 days of very short daylight and cold conditions

Hated to go home but pulled out Saturday and Sunday got 12-16" snow where we were.  Might be done for the winter

TennTim

It would make sense for the trailer plug to be switched. It keeps your fridge from killing your vehicle battery while out for the day. Now what would be awesome with modern vehicles would be a "generator mode" starting up and topping off the battery automatically when it gets low. 

But why not just connect the two batteries in parallel? You would get the run time of both batteries but charge both when the vehicle is running. The DC-AC-DC conversions and inherent inefficiencies (albeit probably little) hurt my engineer head . 

Vermonster

Hi Tenntim.  Just catching up to comments.  Yes, I had once thought why not just hook up with a set of jumpers, which would be connecting them in parallel.  But decided it might not be a good idea because they are different type batteries.  Everything I've read indicates it's important the batteries are matched.  The thing I liked about what I did was that I had read outs at the inverter of wattage draw and the voltage on the truck battery so I knew when I needed to start the truck.  Plus with the charger on the camper battery it would go into maintenance mode when the camper battery was full up and the draw on the truck battery would go to close to 0.  Seemed to work very well for the week we did it.  And preferred it to lugging around a generator.  Next time I will keep track of running time on the truck but it didn't seem like it was much. 

Now im ready to try something else.  Why not just plug my shore line into the inverter?   Would be pretty much the same thing as plugging into a generator, right?  Anyone have thoughts on that?  I'm thinking there might be a little more phantom draw through the campers converter but would allow me to plug in my laptop in the camper rather than running a separate cord through the window like I did this time.  Don't have much of any other needs for 110 AC.  

Ps not using the fridge.  Temps weren't getting much above freezing during the day.  2-3 hours a day on the furnace but still on the same tank of gas after 11 nights!