| Re: [GMCnet] Best battery for house batteries [message #97928] |
Tue, 31 August 2010 11:04 |
Gerald Work
Messages: 102
Registered: June 2010
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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Download a presentation I did for GMC Western States a year or so ago. Should help answer many of your questions.
http://jerrywork.com
Go to the presentations tab and scroll down. As I recall the title is something like, "living large in your GMC".
The key is to contact the manuf. to get the actual amp hour capacity of your proposed batteries at a 20 amp per hour rate of draw. If the batteries are 12 volt, connect them in parallel and add the amp hour rating of the batteries to get the capacity of the bank. If they are 6 volt, then connect two in series (to get 12 volts), and connect each of those pairs in parallel. The amp hour rating of that bank will be half the sum of all batteries. Set your battery monitor to tell you to recharge when you have drawn 50% of that amount (voltage is not a good indicator of battery condition). That is the number of amp hour you can actually use between recharging if you want your battery bank to live a long life before replacement.
Now you can determine what appliances you can use and for how long. Anything 120 volts that you run from your inverter will take about ten times the number of amp hours out of you batteries than is stated on the rating plate of the appliance. Don't try to run high amp draw 120 volt appliances (like heaters, hair dryers, ac, etc) off of your inverter as they will over tax your batteries quickly and greatly shorten battery life. About the only high draw unit you can run is a microwave, and then only for short periods (a few minutes). In a GMC I can't think of any reason to use anything larger than a 2000 watt inverter/battery charger.
We use two 1000 watt inverters (for redundancy) and 460 amp hours of battery bank in our coach.
When you do the math I think you will be surprised at how difficult it is to convert a GMC to all electric including the refer, room heat, cooking, hot water, etc. Be sure to start with a properly installed, high quality battery monitor. Without that you are running blind.
Jerry Work
78Royale, now approaching 11,000 miles on our virtually trouble free cross country adventure.
Kerby, OR (when we get there about the second week in Sept)
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:33:59 -0400
From: larry erd <1ljerd@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GMCnet] Best Battery solution for house batteries???
To: gmclist@temp.gmcnet.org
Message-ID:
<AANLkTim+OMcR-3jghY9uj4DBfhYRGMTtPZas0Ru2f7st@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Has anyone gone all electric on their GMC? I'm just starting on a total
resto which will be a Florida coach
and i don't care for propane, and i would take out the gas heat and maybe
put 12v heat tapes under the floor covering
for the few times i might need it, I was thinking of putting 2- 8d's where
the tank is and a 3'd one next to the
onan and installing a 3000 watt inverter. till me if you all think that
would work.WOW, thats adding 400 #.
thanks for the advise,
larry erd
Sent from my iPad
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