Hi, we have a conway crusader and we are thinking of using the caravan and camping club small sites without using ehu, just using our battery/gas. how do you recharge the battery, do you have any tips about this type of camping, as we are only use to camping with all the extras. Many thanks Bry
How to charge you battery depends on your 'set up'. If you plug the electrics into your car when towing, that can be used to recharge your batteries assuming it is all connected up to do that. Obviously the fridge would need to be set up to run on gas, it will flatten the battery in no time. Other things that may need charging, use a car charger and do them while you are out and about during the day - phones, nintendo ds etc.
Lots of the C&CC certificated sites do have EHU and are still very reasonable prices, rural and small. Have a great time!
I have recently bought a 60w solar panel off ebay £135, I am at present on a camping and caravan club holiday site at Newquay. I have been using the TV/Satellite 2/3 hours a night, laptop and lights, it has easily kept the battery fully charged, to avoid overcharging the battery I use a solar regulator from Maplins £15.99
As above - depends really on what you use. Our Pathfinder has lasted easily 3 nights without any recharge on an 85ah battery but we don;t use any TV's / DVD's or consoles recharge etc and only use lights sparingly so for us non EHU camping is pretty easy.
Many of the CC CL sites have hook up so I would imagine the C&CC small sites are similar
It opens a whole different world of camping being able to use these smaller sites and the only thing I miss compared to a caravan is a shower. Having seen a few tips on keeping a cuple of bottles water in the car windowscreen and a solar shower in a paddling pool may get round that one so we can extend stays to more than say 2 nights at these type of sites. One swe have used don;t have toilets or showers so its back to basics as much as you can in a FC!
On our last unit, we enjoyed "wild camping" and ran a 7" TV, a Freeview box, a compressor fridge, lights and the water pump from a 110Ah battery. Maximum use was 4 days and that was the battery getting topped up with a permenantly fixed roof top 60w solar panel.
"The black area you can see here on the roof"
These days I have to use EHU for medical equipment so our wild camping days are over.
If you had two batteries, you could recharge one during the day when out and about in the car and then the other the next day. Just take a plug from the 12s socket on your towbar and wire the appropriate leads to the spare battery in the car boot. This would be the same as recharging you caravan/fc battery as you drive alaong.