Design Advice: Van Electrical System

[John61CT]

Yes WC you are right, ignore the naysayers.

If you're willing to pay the price in research time / building skills etc on the one hand, or paying a premium for a complete system install by a pro like Bruce @ Ocean Planet

making sure your system is very unlikely to get damaged by any foreseeable events

then the odds are good over their lifetime you won't be spending more than if you stuck with lead.

And with a good dino juice setup, yes, solar becomes completely unnecessary.

But it is a big investment to risk.

 

[DLTooley]

There's an advertised 35 amp hour lithium battery that looks like a reasonable price, until you read the fine print - it's a 35 AH 'Pb' (Lead) **equivalent** - actual ah are like 7 or 8. Yeah, price, and the risk, is the big concern. A smaller solar system supplementing regular alternator charging of FLA might be cheapest. Personally, the benefit of a generator for my set up would be occasional heavy power draws such as power tools. Redundancy in all systems is always a plus.

 

[John61CT]

> it's a 35 AH 'Pb' (Lead) **equivalent** - actual ah are like 7 or 8.

Which just compounds the lie.

Usable capacity of 35AH lead = 17AH

Would require around 20AH of LFP.

The whole market of consumer-oriented, smaller sized ("portable" "solar generator" LOL) powerpacks is **so** rife with scammers.

Outfits like Inergy and Yeti at least don't lie AFAIK, but then the products are IMO grossly overpriced and inflexible.

Unless your total electric usage is truly tiny, it's just not worth starting to investigate LFP without knowing you're going to drop in the neighborhood of at least a couple grand by the time you're done for a production-sized House system.

Yes little science projects can be less money, but only if you enjoy learning about playing with this stuff for fun.

 

[John61CT]

Relevant thread,
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2524356
see Maine Sail's recent post near (current) end of the thread