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19/6/2011 at 5:30pm
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To be honest, you get very little charge through the 12S anyway. If you can borrow a spare battery from someone then you would be better. It depends on your usage, but you should scrape 7 days on a battery no problem. I have just got home from a weekend with an 85aH battery, not used my solar panel as we had no sun anyway and have a motor mover which I had to use quite a bit to get the caravan off my drive and back on again. We also watched quite a few hours TV using an inverter over the weekend and was pleasantly surprised that I still have 12 1/2 volts showing in the battery, although I have recently replaced all our halogen lights with LED. I recently changed our battery as we changed our caravan. The old battery which I left at home would be flat as soon as I got the caravan off the drive, although it is 8 years old and I have decided is pretty much knackered.
It's difficult to say whether your parents battery will last a week, particularly because we don't know how healthy the battery is, the size of the battery or your power requirements. People who don't often go without EHU often find battery management quite difficult whereas people who have been rallying for a while with no EHU can usually get quite a lot longer from a battery without really thinking about it. Obviously, you don't want to invest a lot of money in saving power on a borrowed caravan. You could probably take the battery into a local garage and get it recharged for a few hours for the cost of a drink though. I have two batteries on my car and in an emergency I have replaced my leisure battery with one from the car and put the leisure battery on the car to give it a charge up while we go for a drive. Obviously, most people only have one battery on their car, but you could put the leisure battery on the car and use jump leads off the car battery to start it. You won't start a car from a leisure battery though, even a fully charged one, so don't stop the engine.
I do have a generator too, but not used it in about 2 years as they are noisy and smelly but most of all, petrol is too expensive to make running a generator a alternative to EHU.
Certainly solar panels are getting a lot cheaper than they once were, but unless you are planning on borrowing the caravan a lot to go without EHU spending £200 plus on a suitable solar panel to allow you to be self sufficient on electricity is not really a viable option. A 13 watt panel will extend the use you will get out of a battery in strong sunlight, but probably by no more than 30% which is something I have discovered from personal experience. The way solar panels are coming down in price, you can get a big enough panel to be self sufficient for not much more than the 13 watt brief case style panels. As for the small ones you see for about £20, they put in enough to keep up with natural discharge of a battery, but not anything like enough to keep up with actually using it. They will just about keep a battery topped up if it is not connected to anything, so a good idea for a caravan in storage perhaps (though when mine was in storage I always took the battery home to recharge it) but to provide any usable power, they are pretty much a waste of time.
Post last edited on 19/06/2011 17:38:29
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Topic: Caravan electrics
