Pages

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

New batteries for the motorhome?

I sure do like looking at the days counting down. Essentially, we have less than 2 months of winter left!

And thinking of the Florida sun, I'm trying to figure out what to do with Sherman the motorhome,
and his generator and batteries. For those of you who aren't RV'ers, a motorhome has a battery for the engine, and separate batteries for the "house" part of the motorhome. These batteries run the lights, the furnace, the water pump, the electronics for the fridge and hot water heater, and supply the power for the inverter so that we can run the laptop. These batteries can be recharged 4 ways. We have solar panels, so they recharge by the sun when we're parked up somewhere. They will recharge by driving the motorhome. They will recharge if you plug the RV into an electrical outlet. Or you can start the onboard generator to charge them.


We're different that most Rv'ers. We don't like our generator. We find it noisy, and it uses gasoline. We find that we force ourselves to start it up just to give it some exercise. In short, we really don't need it.


So I'm thinking of removing it, or having it removed. We can use that space to install more and better house batteries. I'm thinking we can probably sell the generator for more than it will cost to install more batteries.


We currently have two 12v marine batteries from Walmart. They're junk, really. I've already got a price from a supplier in Florida for 4 Trojan T-105 6v batteries. These are true deep cycle batteries that are the most popular batteries for boondockers. What is boondocking, you ask? We'll get into that tomorrow...

1 comment:

  1. Hey, Kevin. We are sort of in the same boat. We have plenty of power from our large solar output. We find we are running the genset simply to exercise it as well. The only thing we can't run off our solar is the Air Cond, so we use those hot days to run the generator, and kill two birds with one stone....LOL. Our Class C is running a little heavy, with 6 AGM batteries, so we could stand to lose a few pounds ( us, and the rig ) !!

    ReplyDelete

There are more comments on our facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/TravelwithKevinAndRuth

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.