Mobile home LB

[Joeboy]

Well that went well. Great to run up the diesel heater and see it working after a year idle.

We pulled 8.5A for 15 minutes as I had to cycle the diesel heater twice to get it to start after a year shutdown, the high load is the heater glowplug.

I then ran the heater for 45 mins at 1.6A.

That's 3.325Ah used. The battery started the test at 12.94v final check, temperature remained steady for the test. Finish voltage was 12.81v 5 minutes after shutdown. Just took another reading and battery is reading steady at 12.93v.

I'll need to run it up again as i'd like to see how much load the drop in fridge unit pulls too. That combined with the diesel heater are the big hitters in the van. I'll take a note and keep it in the van. I'll run the two together and see how much load they pull. The LB started life as 110Ah so another couple of hours of the diesel heater running should get me down to around 90% soc, fingers crossed.

[Joeboy]

Ran up the fridge today for a hour. It pulls 5.5A when running flat out!

Total power drawn from battery in last two day is 8.825Ah. I'll round it up to 9Ah used.
1/10th of a volt seems to roughly equate to 10% battery use. I have used around 8.2% of the when new battery capacity.

With a start of 12.94%v reading on the battery I should have a reading of around 12.8 to 12.84% after the two days measured load on a new battery.

Surprisingly I had a reading of 12.8v five minutes after load disconnected. In other words the battery is fine and I have been very fortunate that it allowed my unknowing abuse last Winter.

The diesel heater isn't a big deal, 1.5A @ 55Ah useable capacity is 36 hours running. I only ever offgrid if absolutely stuck and i've only done that twice in four years Greece so too hot and Bulgaria in Nov when i did use the heater, oh aye and in the Alps one night. The real elephant in the room is the 5.5A consumption from the fridge. A mere 10 hours run time! I'll just deal with that and run it when i'm moving now that i'm aware.

Further checks show 7A into the LB from the alternator when engine running and a surprisingly piffly 1.7A from the inverter when the van is plugged into mains. The only other unknown is how much power the 100W PV puts out. I'll check it out sometime but pretty much know the answer is 'enough to run the lights at night'.

That was good fun and I learned a bit. The workaround here is pay the money hook up to site power and enjoy cold beer of an Italian Evening.