Realistic battery life expectatancy?
Hey folks,
I'm planning on staying a few nights off grid in mid December and wondered what I should really expect in terms of battery life based on your experiences.
I have an 80 amp battery on advice from the dealer (no motor mover) and it will be fully charged at point of arrival.
I will be in the van until mid morning each day and back in the early evening and will no doubt be using lighting, TV and the water pump for those times along with the fan for my truma ultraheat. I plan on running the fridge on gas and will also boil water
on gas too.
How many nights do you think I could run like this from the battery? My car doesn't charge the van when connected BTW 
Thanks, Mike
Comments
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A lot will depend on what kind of lighting you have. LED lights will use a lot less energy than other forms of ligting. A TV will use a fair amount. I would keep the use of the fan on the heater to a minimum.
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The lighting is LED lighting. I find that if I don't have the fan on then the rear of the van stays pretty cold (sleeping quarters).
What are your experiences (amount of days life) whilst off grid?
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We tend to spend two or three nights maximum without charging facilities.
Lights and a little TV but no heating...except I would, if required, run the heating without the 12v heating fan switched on.......perhaps not sensible in your case if it is around freezing!
PS. Cross posted.....run the fan for a short period before bed?
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TVs are quite heavy on the juice. Ours is about 32 watts so uses best part of 3 amps per hour. A full evenings TV can therefore use 12-15 amps. With an 80 amp battery and TV usage as you have described I would say after 2 days you will be stressing the
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If it is a good healthy battery of a quality that really means it is an 80 Ah, then at the most you should get 40 Ahs from it.
Throwing some possible numbers about:
Typically a TV takes 2.5 Amps
The heating fan possibly an amp, the pump and just a couple of your LED lights take too little to really need accounting for.
Therefore we can see a drain of 3.5 Amps, and that means about 10 Hours if everything is healthy.
If their use starts at 4:00pm to 10:30, then a morning stint of 07:00 to 09:00, we have 8.5 of the 10 gone in a single day.
Maybe the time scales are a bit out but unless you are very restricted with TV use and resorting to blown air for heating, your duration is going to be very limited. This anyway gives you some guide to what the impact will be.
You can cripple your battery by draining it deeper but that will be the consequences, it will damage it to varying extents depending on its technology/quality.
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if you are planning on doing the off grid thing a bit more often, perhaps you have time, between now and your trip, to get a free standing solar panel.
this may top your battery back up just enough to make the difference you are looking for.
you wont get a huge amount of help in these recent conditions but the SP would help a little, and a lot if you take to off gridding in the better weather.
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http://www.aandncaravanservices.co.uk/ Have a look here before damaging your battery.
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Thanks for your replies guys - kind of wish i'd bought a bigger battery from the onset but realisitcally I will be using EHU for 95% of my caravanning so not a big deal really.
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We tend to turn off the TV and play Scrabble. Having a Scrabble dictionary stops any serious arguments developing.
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