Stopping The Camper Battery From Dying

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Problem:  My Camper battery was dying every 3 to 5 days.

The absolute worst thing you can do for a lead-acid battery is to drain it below 50% of it’s fully charged state.  It greatly reduces the number of battery cycles you can obtain if not outright KILLS THE BATTERY.

So I got a deep cycle AGM battery after I KILLED ANOTHER BATTERY. The AGM battery can be discharged to about 20% remaining capacity without reducing the number of cycles or KILLING THE BATTERY.

Even with the new battery after about 4 days the AGM battery would be at about the 50% state. I paid almost $300 for that battery and I ain’t killing this one.  It’s a real PAIN IN THE A** to hook a charger up every few days and even worse in my garage. I won’t go into that but I don’t have enough outlets, something else gets unplugged and backing the truck over the extension cord (which you aren’t supposed to use with a charger) always causes problems.

Why does the battery drain?  Two words.  PARASITIC DRAIN.

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Battleborn Battery Settings for Victron MPPT Charge Controller and BMV-712 Battery Monitor

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In the wonderful world of solar there are different types of storage batteries.  The Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries are the smartest of all batteries with battery management systems, temperature controls which reduce the charge rate when it is really hot and stop it all together when the battery itself is below freezing.  Heck I’ve seen some batteries that have USB chargers built into them.

Charge controllers are just as smart as are the battery monitoring systems and they have a myriad of settings that is tough to decode.

If you go to the Battleborn Batteries website they have components they recommend for their batteries.  Seems they love the Victron stuff.  Under MPPT Charge Controllers it is all Victron.  Consequently their support pages have all the requisite settings for optimizing your battery charging.

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Finishing Touches On My Solar Energy System

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4 – Renogy 100 watt SolarPanels

I finally got my last 2 solar panels for my array and got them mounted up and now I can produce a whopping 12volts at around 22 amps.  That equals a production of about 264 watts.  In English that means my batteries will charge up and top off pretty darn fast.

Yesterday was a nice sunny day and I have never produced energy before 7:30 or 7:45.  Yesterday it started around 7:00.  By 9 AM my battery was at 13.6 volts which is actually the full operating charge.  Before noon sometime I had maxed and was on Float voltage.  And by “before noon”, I probably mean 10 or 11 because I wasn’t around to check it.

I did have a “Whoops” moment in the design.  When selecting a charge controller you take the number of watts divided by the number of volts to select how high a current regulator you need.
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Some Things I’ve Learned About Solar

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Okay, I’m new at this Solar thing and far from an expert but I have learned a few things.  My goal was/is not to go off grid, it is simply to power most of the items in my bedroom with solar to stretch out gasoline for the generator in a power outage situation such as with the two hurricanes I’ve experienced since moving to Eastern North Carolina.  Secondly I’d like to save a few bucks on the electric bill, and thirdly I get a kick out of doing stuff like this.

My basic goals for solar are:

  • Power a TV and Firestick for entertainment
  • Power a small portable refrigerator
  • Power a Shortwave receiver with an active (powered) antenna
  • Power an LED lamp
  • Power a 12v fan
  • Power a battery recharge station to keep AM/FM/Shortwave radios powered
  • Save a few bucks (with the understanding I’ll probably never recoup the cost of all this stuff)

I call this my lifeboat.  Here are a couple of things I have learned so far.

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Already Changing The Solar Build

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I built a solar system to power my master bedroom and placed it in the closet. I had intended for it to sit between two sets of shelves against the wall.  Rather than measure I guessed it was slightly more than 2′ between the shelves.   Guess what?  It was just less than 2 feet.

So I was in a situation where I needed to trim the board down however that would have caused a full disassemble.  I decided the easiest and fasted thing to do was to just go to Lowe’s and get a smaller board and then swap over.

Then at some point upgrade-itis got the best of me.  I had no method of battery monitoring other than the voltage displayed on the MT50 display screen.  That’s not really a battery monitor.  Then I decided I’d get a bluetooth fancy Charge Controller that I could monitor from everywhere.  I have a Mac mini at home that is on all the time and within BlueTooth range of the controller.  I can just VPN into my network and see the battery state.

VictronConnect App on MacOS displaying battery information

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BattleBorn Batteries LiFePO4 Settings on Epever MPPT Charge Controller

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BattleBorn LiFePO4 Battery

I took the $1000 plunge and got a BattleBorn 100 amp hour battery.  I know it sounds crazy but there is literally NO COMPARISON between this battery and a Flooded Lead Acid battery (my first solar battery) or an AGM Deep Cycle Battery (my second solar battery).

The BattleBorn Battery wins in EVERY single metric except maybe for cost.

It charges like lightning, stays charged, and uses power way more efficiently and lasts longer than the other two batteries I mentioned above.

 

If you have a solar storage system of any kind you will benefit from this battery.  I guarantee it.  The biggest advantage is in depth of discharge (DOD).  That means you can use the battery near death and it won’t damage it.   Take a lead acid battery and use it below 50% of charge and you’ll damage it.

My charge controller is an Epever 20 amp Tracer BN 2215 MPPT.  It does NOT have a Lithium Iron Phosphate setting but it does have a configurable USER mode.   If you set the parameters manually you’ll have a perfect setup for maintaining your $1000 battery.

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Off Grid Solar – First Experiments

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I am neither prepper nor survivalist but I do get a kick out of being somewhat self sustainable.  At the end of this I hope to achieve a working knowledge of solar systems and to possibly apply that knowledge to a larger scale application of a solar installation.

Make your own free electricity.  No taxes, no smart meter checking your consumption.  Yeah, well, we’re not making that much electricity here.😃

My intent here is to make a 12vdc system with a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery and create 1000 watts of AC power via a pure sine wave inverter.  1000 watts won’t carry you too far or too long but with the right component mix you could do some large essential tasks like maybe run the washing machine or watching TV for several hours.  Small current drawing appliances like LED lights and items like that will run for ages.

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Sonoff S31 Power Monitor

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Sonoff S31

I’ve actually blogged about this before but I bought some more of these and just think that the Sonoff S31 is the best power monitoring device going.   I got mine on Amazon for about $18 each and I think you can find them a buck or two cheaper in other places.  Just make sure that you don’t purchase the Sonoff S31 LITE.. The Lite version DOES NOT power monitor.

The devices work with an app called EWELink but the company that makes all this is called iTead  and they are a Chinese company based in China and some people have caught their app sending back interesting information to the home server in China.   In short……..I don’t trust the app.  You can use them right out of the box with the app but that’s not what I’m all about here at John’s Tech Blog.

So what I do is to modify the devices firmware with something called Tasmota which works on Wifi, creates a web page that displays all your vital information and it ONLY reports to any server if you TELL IT TO.  Mine reports to MY machine to machine protocol server (MQTT) so I can tie the switches into my Home Automation software so I can turn them on and off.  Also you can do really cool stuff which I won’t go into here in great detail.  For example, I can have it send me an email if it sees a refrigerator showing so many watts for so long a period of time.  Excessive wattage would be from the light bulb being on so maybe me pulling 60 extra watts for 2 minutes means someone left the door ajar.  Cool.

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Alpicool C20 Portable Refrigerator

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Alpicool C20 Portable Refrigerator

Alpicool C20 Portable Refrigerator

I like gadgets.  And I like useful gadgets.  Why not a portable refrigerator?  Truckers use them.  People who own smaller boats use them.  People who boondock camp use them.  Or how many times have you holiday driven home and thought it would be nice to have some cool drinks or lunch meat for sandwiches available so you aren’t eating expensive, just off the interstate, food.  I drive quite a bit for work and live in hotels a bit as well.  Now that we’ve identified a need let’s identify a product solution.

Enter the Alpicool C20 portable refrigerator/freezer.   That’s right, it is also a freezer.  Cost new was $179, however I must have caught that just right as it is now $209.  I have a three way (120v, 12vdc, gas) Dometic refrigerator in my camper.  It sure is nice but it is NOT a freezer.  I think we all know what happens to chicken and pork after 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator.  If we go out in the woods for any amount of time we may need some method of freezing food unless we want to eat MRE’s.  I do not.
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ZAMP Solar Ready Camper – What Does That Mean?

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If you go look at campers there almost always is a sticker on the camper or the dealer will tell you it is “Solar Ready”.

Wow!  Sounds cool.  Let’s delve into what that means.  In the case of my camper, a Rockwood A122 pop up A Frame camper it means there is a 2 pin connector, SAE style located on the frame.

Zamp SAE style Solar Connector

The top pin (male) is wired to the battery and the bottom pin is wired to the frame (ground).  Note that the sticker says to only hook it up to a ZAMP Solar Charging System.  Okay.  If you look at the ZAMP systems they are basically a suitcase solar panel with a charge controller on them.  They want like $700 for them.  It’s crazy.

If you go to Amazon you can get a 100 watt Renogy Solar Suitcase with a waterproof charge controller for about $240.  That’s a no brainer.  What’s the catch?

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