Hey there this is my first post on here. My name is jake im 21 i have got a high top t25 i bought a few months ago and i love it !! i have doen quite a few miles on it all ready to a few festivals and a couple of surf trips down the west country but at the begin of may im taking it on a 4 month road trip morocco what is gonna be quite an adventure!!
any way .. i wanna get a solar panel hooked up to power the fridge and the lights... i was looking at this http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=97377 and was wondering about your guys opinion? would it be the right thing for what i need and is that a fair price?
also can i hook the stereo up to the leisure battery so i can listen to music without killing the main battery?
im super new to all this and do not know a great deal about car and electronics... so any help would be amazing ... keep it simple
Welcome to the great resource and friendly forum that is 80-90
Afraid solar still has me a bit baffled so I'll leave that to someone else, but as for the stereo off the leisure battery, that's not a problem. Depending on what set up you already have it's pretty easy; if its a Westy there's a simple mod in the fusebox, if not, just rewire it through a fusebox from your LB - pretty sure it's all in the Wiki (button at the top of the page).
Take time out to join properly (it costs nowt !) and fill in your profile with your details, location etc. There may be someone nearby who can show you their set up. We're hoping to have a run down the Moroccan coast later in the year so look forward to your tales and advice, we've been a few times and love the country & the people, but we've never driven over. There was a group of Syncros did Morocco a couple of years back, photos are on here or Brickyard somewhere.
hi jake and welcome, reading your post i noticed you wanted to run the fridge from solar, well depending on your fridge i would say it wont work! the panel you pointed out is 43 watt max output, you only get 43 watt if your in the sahara at mid day! i run a 60 watt and am lucky to see half that. is your fridge not a 3 way? running it on gas would be a better option, as for lights the leisure battery fully charged should power them for a couple of days no problem. change as much lighting for LEDs or SMDs as you can to save you a bit of power, if you do install the solar set up it will probs give you 24 ish watts that's about 2 amps an hour at 12volts i seem to remember so at least you can charge your leisure battery from the sun as you camp.
i would defo put the radio and any other ICE on the leisure think its in the wiki, easy to do. either that or carry a jump starter battery with you. nothing worse than having the radio on all day then discovering the engine wont start.
dont fix it if its not broke cos after you finish it will be!
should have said as well if your on a longish trip how often will you be driving? if your going to be camping a couple of days at a time the solar will help charge the battery but if your only stopping a night at a time and doing a fair bit of driving everyday then the battery will get charged as you drive.
dont fix it if its not broke cos after you finish it will be!
So .. i do have a 3 way fridge.. how much gas does it burn ? would it go though bottles quickly using it to power the fridge?
As far as driving goes i reckon it will be a bit of both .. camping for a few days driving here and there..... So by the looks of things it may be worth getting one of them monster batterys that kev the rev was talking about...if i got some thing like this http://www.totalbatteries.co.uk/i-J185G ... I7332.html .. would that last me a good amount of time? ... at the moment im using a standard http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stor ... 65475#dtab halfords jobby.
i just wanna keep beers cold have some light and power my stereo without getting caught out.
any more advice you guys wanna give me would be sweet thanks
As boatdog points out a normal 3 way fridge may struggle from solar - normally they only run of 12v when the engine's running so you'd have to alter that to run it off 12v when parked up from your solar set up ( as I understand it anyway ) I looked into it when I replaced my fridge a while ago and was advised that, for the best 12v performance, to go for a compressor fridge. If you have a heavy duty battery set up as suggested by kevtherev earlier, you could run a compressor fridge whilst parked up quite happily.
If you have a 3 way fridge, then yes - gas is the way to go, buy your gas in Spain before you cross, get a big Repsol butane and it will last a long time (the big round orange ones are great- ours lasted from January through til May). Moroccan gas cylinders will be an a*** to get the regs for but a decent ironmongers in Spain (ferreteria but I may well have spelt that wrong) will have all the necessary adaptors and regs to use with the Repsol bottle. Don't be tempted to have your bottle refilled by a Spanish "specialist" though - it will probably be over pressured and leak.
Definately swap your lighting for LED to save on power and also reduce heat output
But don't let a fridge rule your trip - Most Moroccan towns have a bottle shop that will sell you nice cheap bottles or cans of Flag Speciale or similar from a very big cold fridge, just stick em in a cool box with some ice & enjoy - the bars are cheap too if you follow the locals. Often there's a posh looking door for tourists and a not so posh looking door for locals that lead to the same bar at half the price
Jake T wrote:ok wow . thanks for all your help already!
So .. i do have a 3 way fridge.. how much gas does it burn ? would it go though bottles quickly using it to power the fridge?
nope it's a little pilot light
As far as driving goes i reckon it will be a bit of both .. camping for a few days driving here and there..... So by the looks of things it may be worth getting one of them monster batterys that kev the rev was talking about...if i got some thing like this http://www.totalbatteries.co.uk/i-J185G ... I7332.html .. would that last me a good amount of time? ...
it would go for weeks without a charge.. most leisures have half that power
this is my favourite
Specifications
Voltage: 6V
Capacity(20Hr): 240Ah
Reserve Capacity: 25A: 488 mins 75A: 132 mins
two of these in series and you have a very long lasting supply of power..
Length 264 mm
Width 181 mm
Height 276 mm
wire it in series with another the same and that's 480 a/h..
ok my next question is where to store the battery and big gas? at the moment my LB is neatly tucked under my passenger seat...if i was to use anything bigger or use two as you said i would need to move them to else where.... is there a place that is common ? the same with the gas .. at the moment there is only room for a smallish gas bottle under my fuseboard.. if i was to get a bigger bottle is there a common place to store it? and i guess i would need to get a longer gas lead...
as far as the trip to morroco goes i will be spending 3 months just to get there though europe starting in ireland first for abit so it wont mainly be based in morroco that is the finale destination ,.
thanks loads guys you have been a massive help so far
It all depends on the inside layout of your van, from here on in, Jake...
A couple of batteries under a rock n roll bed, Move the starter battery to the engine bay and have 2 leisures under the front seats, Keep your gas bottle outside whilst parked up, loads of possibilities, not over keen on the gas being under a fuseboard though Separate locker is what you need really with drop out holes in the floor in case of a leak, and no electrics in there... (Obviously your gas will always be switched off at the bottle whilst moving)
Get some photos up
Top tip for somewhere to stop & chill out before and after you go to & from Morocco - Camping Rio Jara, Tarifa. http://www.campingriojara.com/ Depending on the time of year, we spent a month there the other Winter and it was very quiet, but it's really busy in Summer apparently.... Excellent site with a good kite surfing community, easy run into Tarifa town - very quick crossing to Africa and it's the base for Blue Camel Tours who lead motorhome tours in Morocco when they're between trips - lovely people and well worth talking to
Last edited by andisnewsyncro on 01 Mar 2010, 20:32, edited 1 time in total.
well what i will do is take aload of photos and see what all you guys think is the best way to go about stuff .. im not leaving for my trip till may the 1st so i got abit of time to get stuff together.
i was also thinking of putting some 6x9 speakers in the face of the cuboard under the bed but it might mess with storage room ... sooo many questions haha .. i will get you all some photos
Kev quote.....wire it in series with another the same and that's 480 a/h.. nooooo it isn't, still 240A/H but now 12volts.
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Right, I'm glad someone caught Kev's error about adding the amp-hours.
Put in series, add voltages together, amp-hours are the same.
Put in parallel, add amp-hours together, voltage is the same.
Them are nice batteries, though. An update on the classic T-220, with 20 extra Ah. Trojan is a top-shelf brand, very good construction and service life. Two of those could be nestled in some storage area easily and you would have a fairly huge cabin battery. When they get even moderately discharged, like only 30-40%, they would accept as much current as your 90A alternator could spare ( the 90A alternator will make 75A at best, and vehicle baseloads will eat up 20-30A most of the time ), so make sure you upgrade the wiring from the alternator to the starter pole because it could be under high load for an hour or two, if you use the batteries as hard as you plan to. That wiring from the factory is already a little under spec, but in the vehicle as-built it hardly ever carries more than half the alternator output for more than a few minutes so they get away with it. VW almost always underspecs their wire sizes, their electrical design department have always been cheap-ass bastards and besides they really didn't plan on these things being in service for 20 years and then some.
But holy crap, you all pay a lot for stuff over there. 132 Pounds at today's rate is almost $200. I can buy new L16 6V with 375Ah for $225 apiece, and no tax because of solar incentives in our state.
Smaller PV panels have a higher price-per-watt but that 43w PV panel is sickeningly overpriced at almost $10/watt even with the charge controller added in, and it would barely make a dent in your power usage if you have the fridge running much. I would shop for a PV panel alone, don't waste time looking at PV "kits", and for that money you should be able to get into at least a 70w panel even with your VAT and all. The going rate here for panels in that size range is not more than $5.25/watt before taxes (which vary a lot from state to state). That's about 3.5 Pounds. For your plans, you would really do best with a panel over 100w, and at that size over here we wouldn't be paying more than $5/watt (actually less than $4.50 is more like it).
You're far better off buying a bigger panel and a small charge controller separately. A 100w panel would put out around 6A and a charge controller with that capacity shouldn't cost more than about 30 Pounds. If you're actually using the battery much day-to-day with the fridge running at all, you could dispense with the charge controller completely so long as you're willing to disconnect it when you get home, but having a charge controller does let you forget about managing charge, and with a bidirectional battery combiner it would keep both batteries topped off when your rig is parked, so long as it isn't parked in the garage.
The others here could tell you how many amps the fridge uses, and the duty cycle, so you end up knowing the Ah/day requirement for that load alone. Take that figure, divide by 6 peak charge hours/day, and you'll have the amps you need your panel to produce. Multiply that by 17 (no, not 12, around 16-17 is actual panel voltage for standard test conditions) and you'll have an idea of the watt rating a panel would need to have to keep the fridge running day-on-day. That is with the panel in a fixed position facing south all day long; if you move it from time to time during the day to track the sun you might be able to get as much as 10 hours of good peak charge per day, but I wouldn't plan the system around that because the human-intervention factor is the first thing to fall by the wayside.
Nice thing about planning this type of system is that you always have the engine alternator to back you up, and driving from place-to-place for a couple hours or more will top off your batteries. But if you want to boondock for days on end and not need to run the engine, then the simple math above is enough to get you pretty close in sizing the system.
(By the way, I've lived on PV power, house and workshop, for 15 years, and I've designed and built most of the PV systems around my off-grid neighborhood as well as some large commercial systems, so you can take that for what it's worth when considering my advice).
) I looked into it when I replaced my fridge a while ago and was advised that, for the best 12v performance, to go for a compressor fridge. If you have a heavy duty battery set up as suggested by kevtherev earlier, you could run a compressor fridge whilst parked up quite happily.
Separate locker is what you need really with drop out holes in the floor in case of a leak, and no electrics in there... (Obviously your gas will always be switched off at the bottle whilst moving)
nooooo it isn't, still 240A/H but now 12volts.