Thor Forums

[AJMike]

Originally Posted by Wiley1

You have figured out a way to camp for 3 nights on 100ah total, without running the generator? That's pretty amazing. No solar panels?

When we stay one night at Cracker Barrel, we wake up to find our FOUR AGM batteries at 55%, so we've used 180ah in one night. That's with nothing running except one TV and a maybe a couple of 4" fans and a little laptop charging time. The fridge, cabin heater, and water heater are using propane.

What's your secret?

That seems like a lot of power to be using in a single night.

In our Fuse, with the 2 100AH batteries at 100% at 5:00 pm (when the sun is too low in the sky to provide any useful power) we run the DVD player and the TV, the LED lights in our RV, set out some 110 volt fans to cool the RV, run our compressor refrigerator and, in the morning, use an electric tea kettle and, sometimes, an electric toaster and still have 55-60% of our power remaining. That means that we have used something like 80-90AH over 12-13 hours during the night.

Of course you say you are using your cabin heat, propane refrigerator and water heater and all of those use electric. The cabin heater uses a fan that might draw considerable current, the propane refrigerator uses electric for its controls and turning the gas flow on and off as the refrigerator cycles and the water heater does the same. On those times when we use our cabin heater (also on propane) I have noticed some heavy electric use from the fan which seems much less efficient that the cooling fans that we use. In general we never run the cabin heater until the morning. Perhaps that is the source of your power usage.