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Old 03-23-2024, 09:51 PM   #1
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House batteries

How long will house batteries keep their charge. If you’re using minimum lights and other accessories. Wanting for boondocking

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Old 03-23-2024, 10:25 PM   #2
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Originally Posted by Terril Riley View Post
How long will house batteries keep their charge. If you’re using minimum lights and other accessories. Wanting for boondocking
Not enough info to make any type of educated guess.

Battery type
How many
Age of batteries
Solar
Power being used

Without info my guess is 5 minutes.
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Old 03-23-2024, 10:36 PM   #3
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To answer your question, one would need to know what types of batteries you have now and their condition. Then minimum would be relative what exactly is running.

But lets say you had 200ah total house capacity and very good batteries, and what you call minimum was actually subtotaled to be 1ah / hours. Then you have 100 hours with those lights on before your batteries dropped to the 50% threshold.

If you planning on heavy boondocking, you will not have enough to do where it seems like you are trying to find out? But I am only guessing because more info is needed as stated above.
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Old 03-23-2024, 11:23 PM   #4
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Old 03-23-2024, 11:40 PM   #5
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I have two 700 amp deep cycle marine batteries
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Old 03-23-2024, 11:53 PM   #6
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I have two 700 amp deep cycle marine batteries
WOW!! 700? Is that a typo? Maybe 70Ah?
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Old 03-24-2024, 12:15 AM   #7
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So long and no longer.

"700 amps" is a CCA number and not a capacity number. Capacity is measured in Amp-Hours (AHs). We also need to know what kind of batteries you have, Flooded Lead Acid or AGM or Lithium.

On the other end we have no idea what RV you have, what loads besides lights are running (i.e. - a residential fridge, an inverter, etc.) that needs to be known in order to be able to give you any kind of reasonable estimate of time.
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Old 03-24-2024, 12:25 AM   #8
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My bet is that these are marine/rv hybrid batteries.... the kind intended for starting a boat engine as well as some light duty deep cycle use.
probably 700 CCA.... which is pretty much a meaningless specification point in this application

marine batteries with that sort of size are likely to be in the ballpark of 100Ah if I had to guess based on looking generically online at those around 700 CCA

so total capacity might be 200Ah if both batteries are in great condition...and as dkoldman suggested, you don't really want to draw them down past around about the 50% mark (based on a commonly accepted rule of thumb)...so you have 100Ah to work with

A typical light bulb for an RV ceiling fixture might be 1.5W
/12 = 0.125A....and say there are two bulbs in each fixture....
that makes 0.25A for each hour the one light fixture is switched on
add to that...a little bit of run time for the water pump, the fridge , etc...

Anyway, seems like you might need a bit of a primer on this topic. Here's a good old reference
The 12volt Side of Life (Part 1)

In simple terms
My rig used to have one of those marine hybrid batteries. We never did do a lot of off-grid boondocking, but had no problem burning a few lights for a few hours in the evening + running the 2-way fridge on propane+ water heater on propane...for one overnight stop. Then the next day the battery would get recharged through a combination of driving and/or maybe running the generator for a bit. And now that I think about it back in those days my rig would have had the original incandescent bulbs which burn more energy

The largest 12 volt draw I have in my rig is the furnace. I could run it for a bit to take the chill off, but surely couldn't come close to running it for extended periods of time.

I am actually very curious to hear folks ballpark answers about run time with the newer rigs that use a residential fridge running through an inverter. With a rather limited battery bank of say one or two of these sort of batteries, and moderate use of other things..... water pump for toilet flushing and hand washing, maybe a quick shower or two, and lets say zero use of the furnace fan. I've been curious how those residential type fridges affect the battery run time...
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Old 03-24-2024, 03:07 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Terril Riley View Post
I have two 700 amp deep cycle marine batteries
May I suggest pictures? If you do, make certain we can read what is on your batteries, picture of Inverter (if you have one?) . Also tell us if we can assume you have propane fridge running when you say light / minimum use? The masses kid not on difficulty to answer for you what otherwise may seem like a simple question. i.e some coaches draw power for CO detectors off the house batteries while others do not.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chateau_Nomad View Post
WOW!! 700? Is that a typo? Maybe 70Ah?
or maybe 7DekaAH?

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Originally Posted by blw2 View Post
My bet is that these are marine/rv hybrid batteries.... the kind intended for starting a boat engine as well as some light duty deep cycle use.
probably 700 CCA.... which is pretty much a meaningless specification point in this application

marine batteries with that sort of size are likely to be in the ballpark of 100Ah if I had to guess based on looking generically online at those around 700 CCA
I just picked up 2 of these Marine / RV Starter batteries from Batteries Plus for my boat. https://www.batteriesplus.com/produc...nCode=VI23753#

I don't think they even bother with AH rating for the Starter batteries. Even though one of my batteries is dedicated for starting both engines, the house battery can be used to start the engines as well. 800CCA and 1000Marine Cranking Amps. We don't run a trolling motor or anything like it; so a Deep Cycle gives us no advantage. If OP has a true deep cycle, it should list the AH rating and CCA should be secondary if any consideration at all.
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Old 03-24-2024, 11:07 PM   #10
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"""I am actually very curious to hear folks ballpark answers about run time with the newer rigs that use a residential fridge running through an inverter. With a rather limited battery bank of say one or two of these sort of batteries, and moderate use of other things..... water pump for toilet flushing and hand washing, maybe a quick shower or two, and lets say zero use of the furnace fan. I've been curious how those residential type fridges affect the battery run time..."""""
With 4 - Crown 6V 100Ah two in series with 2 in parallel,, 12 Volt
100% state of charge according to the victron shunt, The lead acid battery's will be at 54% in two hours with my fridge.. When Solar Panels are supplying 240 watts I get almost 1 amp of charge back to the battery's.
My plan is to remove the lead acid and replace with two BB li battery's, 270 AH each.. Yep 270 AH X 2 $$$$$$$$ If diesel keeps going up that is but it dont make sense to spend 5K in battery's when the gen only burns .5 gal per hour.. oh well, I cant take it with me
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Old 03-25-2024, 02:50 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by First RV 4 me View Post
"""I am actually very curious to hear folks ballpark answers about run time with the newer rigs that use a residential fridge running through an inverter. With a rather limited battery bank of say one or two of these sort of batteries, and moderate use of other things..... water pump for toilet flushing and hand washing, maybe a quick shower or two, and lets say zero use of the furnace fan. I've been curious how those residential type fridges affect the battery run time..."""""
With 4 - Crown 6V 100Ah two in series with 2 in parallel,, 12 Volt
100% state of charge according to the victron shunt, The lead acid battery's will be at 54% in two hours with my fridge.. When Solar Panels are supplying 240 watts I get almost 1 amp of charge back to the battery's.
My plan is to remove the lead acid and replace with two BB li battery's, 270 AH each.. Yep 270 AH X 2 $$$$$$$$ If diesel keeps going up that is but it dont make sense to spend 5K in battery's when the gen only burns .5 gal per hour.. oh well, I cant take it with me
I don't have a Residential fridge as primary, but the 1st RV we fell in love with was the ACE 29.3, some came with a Residential fridge and my wife loved it. We were hell bent on a buying a RV with Residential fridge and passed on a lot of good deals with Absorption fridges. Then we noticed that TMC had only made a limited number of the ACE 29.3s with the Residential fridges. TMC offered to help us find one but they were in places too far for us to consider. We were told they no longer had the Residential fridge model as it was unavailable, but I kind of assumed they stopped making because there were issues with the batteries and the residential fridges because we did read some complaints. Next thing we knew TMC discontinued making the ACE 29.3

As fate would have it, we wound up with an Absorption fridge thinking the worse from all of the negative post on Norcold, i.e. it would never stay cold etc., but the Norcold has been great for us 5 years running. FWIW, our 2nd Fridge in outdoor kitchen is Residential.

A few years ago I wired our Norcold to run off our 1000w inverter, since it is not residential it draws a lot more juice. I have not checked lately, but seems like I could get 2 - 3 hours off my two 125 ah Vmax tanks. When driving it is not an issue as inverter is on and it's being recharged, but the 2 - 3 hours is plenty of time when we stop to go get something eat or waiting to get setup. But that is not a real need because I normally will have the Absorption on Auto mode so we can simply turn the inverter off when stopped, and it switches to propane and vice versa when we start to drive again.

Now I can run the Outdoor Fridge into a 2nd day, but never need to. After what I have learned, I can't imagine having a Residential fridge as primary. If I did, I would need to double or triple up on the AGMs or be trying to go to Lithium like you are pursuing. Actually this is where the 6 volt golf cart AGMs would be handy if you did not want to go to Lithium.
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Old 03-25-2024, 06:25 AM   #12
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Air conditioners and compressor refrigerators are the two largest wattage appliances in an RV. A compressor based refrigerator uses between 300 - 500 watts while running. So that's between 25 - 41 amps per hour @ 12 volts when the compressor is running. Doing the math shows that these two items alone require rather large battery banks for any appreciable run time.

Absorption refers have the downsides of needing to be level, taking a long time to initially cool, and have limitations on cooling difference below ambient temperature. But their upside is the option of propane or electricity... and once cooled they tend to be more efficient than compressor refrigerators.

Bottom line... if you're planning on using a compressor fridge off battery power, best to find the average watt usage (like any appliance) and calculate battery capacity accordingly.
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