running on batteris for the first time

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

megamike

Member
Joined
Nov 4, 2018
Posts
21
hi there! i'm excited to try boon-docking for the first time! i am going away with family for 2 nights in Florida and i was wondering how long i can run on batteries on a single charge. i have 107 amp/h battery and 2 30 lbs of propane. all fully charged. i am planning on just running the fridge on LP mode for the duration of the trip and pump for minimal use. no lights (i have separate ones). will i be OK? is there any rule of thumb about running the LP fridge on batteries?
thank you!
Mike
 
What I would do is camp in your driveway for 2 nights and see what happens. Use the pump and fridge just like you intend to do.
 
You have enough propane to run the fridge for weeks.  And if you truly use the battery only for powering the water pump and the fridge circuit board, that too should last more than a week. But what about a water heater (propane + 12v circuit board)?  And maybe a bit of furnace use?  We've been having cold nights in Florida (45 last night) and an RV furnace sucks both propane and battery amps.
 
thank you so much! yes i forgot about the heater but i figured it will run mostly on propane no? for the heater we will have buddy-heater running on a separate tank as well as the bbq.
so i should be ok?
 
megamike said:
thank you so much! yes i forgot about the heater but i figured it will run mostly on propane no? for the heater we will have buddy-heater running on a separate tank as well as the bbq.
so i should be ok?

The RV furnace will kill the battery in one night due to the high draw blower. (It also uses a ton of propane but you'd be fine for two nights.) If you have a buddy heater and use only that, you'll be fine. Remember when using the buddy to leave a couple windows cracked. Yes that will let in cold air, but you need to let in fresh air also.
 
Without knowing details of your equipment it is hard to say, modern 6-8 cu ft RV refrigerators require 6-12 watts of electricity nearly constantly to power their control electronics while running on propane.  I have one of the models which draws 12 watt in my motorhome, and can power it for a week before my pair of deep cycle batteries get low, so if you have 1 deep cycle battery and the same model refrigerator I would give it 3-4 days running refrigerator alone.  Having said that my Suburban SF series propane furnace can suck my batteries down almost by itself on long cold winter night, though here smaller trailers will tend to have the smaller NT series Suburban furnace which draws only about half as many amps as the SF series.

p.s. some rv refrigerators have a "climate control" (door defrost heater) switch on them, which you can turn off to lower amp draw while running on propane.
 
megamike said:
thank you so much! yes i forgot about the heater but i figured it will run mostly on propane no? for the heater we will have buddy-heater running on a separate tank as well as the bbq.
so i should be ok?
I hope you DO NOT mean you're using the BBQ for heat inside your rv.
 
No one here can tell you how long you can go because no one knows what equipment you have, and there's no way to know how much it will be run because it literally depends on the weather.  It could be one night, it could be a week. 

If you want to know how to estimate it, you measure what all your electrical loads are and compare that to your battery capacity.  As an example, I recall my heater draws 7 amps when it's running.  Around 30F outside, set for 68 inside it runs for a total of 20 minutes every hour.  So that's 7amps for 1/3 of an hour, 2.33Ah.  Times say, 8 hours overnight is 18.6Ah.  I know my batteries are a solid 200+Ah so roughly speaking, I could run my heater 10 nights.  Now, throw in lights, refrigerator, TV, water pump and everything else you run and your capacity is used quicker.  But experience (and a few driveway campouts) has shown me that I can easily go for days running whatever I want and still not kill the batteries dead.  I end up charging them just because I should, not because I have to.  Until you get an idea for not only what your devices draw and what your batteries will hold up to under YOUR conditions, you'll just have to watch and see as you go.  Hopefully you have some kind of battery monitor to see where you're at and can see how quickly you're draining them, so you'll get an idea whether you'll make it through a night and not wake up to a cold dark RV.

Mark B.
Albuquerque, NM
 
happy to report that everything was great! we had a blast and we managed to still not go below 50%. thank you all!
 
megamike said:
happy to report that everything was great! we had a blast and we managed to still not go below 50%. thank you all!

And you have a better idea of what you can do on you next adventure.
 
megamike said:
happy to report that everything was great! we had a blast and we managed to still not go below 50%. thank you all!


Excellent! It's very cool to pull in to a scenic spot, have some comforts of home, yet be completely disconnected. Glad it went well. And as Gizmo100 said, you now have a much better feel for what you can do, which will give you confidence to do it again. So... go do it again!  ;) ;D
 

Latest posts

Forum statistics

Threads
131,981
Posts
1,388,586
Members
137,726
Latest member
CampMike2270
Back
Top Bottom