Who needs Electriciy?

Motorhomes are more versatile than caravans in that they can be occupied self-sufficiently for at least a couple of days without needing the facilities of a Camping Site or CL, and much longer than that if you adapt your approach.  This is very useful when you are touring abroad.

But doing without mains electricity was a problem.  We like our TV of an evening, if only to catch up with the news and weather, so my first efforts at living on 12 volts involved choosing a TV which ran on 12 volts.  We had a pair of leisure batteries and we could cope for at least two nights between hook ups – and I bought a generator so I could keep it topped up when necessary.

Or so I thought because it turned out that I would have to run the generator for rather a long time to top up the leisure batteries if they were down – and nor would a full day’s driving do it either.  Electrical self-sufficiency was being elusive and I wanted more.  I didn’t particularly like carrying petrol for the generator in my diesel motorhome, so further development was necessary.

In practice I was more often than not on a campsite at least every third night so there wasn’t really a problem, because one overnight hook up was always enough to top the batteries up fully again.  But I still yearned for open-ended electrical self-sufficiency, so I looked at different technology as it came out. 

I did buy a 3,000 watt inverter to run the microwave but without real confidence about installing it, so it never got installed and is still in the box.  Eventually we realised that we never used the microwave so that came out, liberating significant payload and a whole locker for storing other things.

Those silent generators which run on chemicals looked promising but they were expensive and my experience so far with generators was that I could only be bothered getting it out relatively rarely, so would I be bothered using one of those?  I wanted an idle solution.    

It was some years before my Lancashire thrift would allow me to buy a satellite TV system and even then I started with an aerial which had to be set up on a tripod on the ground before frustration with this task drove me to buy an automatic roof-top version.  This runs on 12 volts too.

Almost everything electrical on the motorhome now works on 12 volts - or if from its own rechargeable batteries, like laptop and IPhone, can be charged up either directly from 12 volts or using a small capacity (150 watts) portable inverter.  The only exceptions are the Tassimo coffee machine (don’t laugh, we like coffee) and the roof top air conditioning – which we’ve found we use only rarely.

But we were still limited to two or three days between electrical hook ups.  I’d seen solar panels and thought about them but for some reasons remained unconvinced.  They were supposed to charge at up to 5 amps or more but I live in Lancashire, where we don’t really believe in sunshine as a regular feature of life.

It was as I was retiring, when our plans to do more and further-away motorhoming were imminent that we happened to go to the C&CC’s National Festival of Lanterns, where there was quite a large trade exhibition, including three stands selling solar panels.  I took the opportunity to look at the stuff they were offering and pick their brains.

Without naming names, two of the three came over as potentially cowboy outfits and it was a bit difficult to swallow what they were promising.  It was only when I spoke to the guy on third stand that I recognised that I was talking to a man who genuinely knew his stuff.  I should explain that I am something of a technophile and I pride myself on being able to spot sales bullshit when it’s being dished out and it puts me off.  This guy wasn’t at all pushy; he knew his products were good ones and he had the confidence not to over-sell.

There comes a point when you make the leap of faith and it happened to me talking to him.  Not straight away of course, but as we wandered around the site over those three days I went back a few times.  I once asked a car salesman with whom I had got friendly who was the customer he dreaded and he answered, quick as a flash “a 35 year old teacher with a beard and a copy of the Guardian under his arm”.  Apparently they nit pick for ever before buying and then complain about the least thing at enormous length afterwards.  I hoped I wasn’t getting into this sort of territory.

I suppose it was his depth of technical knowledge – for example he was the only one of the three to explain that for my motorhome a special regulator was required, to integrate the installation into the van’s existing charging/monitoring system.  The other two exhibitors hadn’t mentioned this opportunity and were planning to wire their charger directly to the leisure batteries.  It would cost extra but it would do the job properly.   I bought his system and his installer did the job a couple of hours later.

Unfortunately by then it was starting to go dark, so apart from a quick glimpse of it generating a little bit, to show it worked, there was no opportunity to see whether it worked as advertised.  This probably saved me from spending ages glued to the gauge, grinning every time I saw the evidence of free electricity flowing into my batteries.  It’s not free of course because the solar panels aren’t free and they do have a finite life but it feels free.

But with 130 nominal watts of solar charging capacity we should have enough to be self sufficient, at least when we were outside Lancashire and indeed so did practical experience prove to be the case.  The solar panels perform exactly as advertised and they keep working even while we’re on the move, so it matters not whether we move or stay, the batteries will be recharged by sunset.

We can now watch TV as much as we wish and use the 12 volt lighting freely (now it’s been converted to LEDs) and, with a spare toilet cassette in case of difficulty, we are now as self-sufficient as I feel the need to be. 

Compromises are necessary and so the generator, rarely used anyway, stays at home these days with the gain of more payload.  The roof top air-con is a now a complete non-starter unless we are hooked up, so we choose places to stop where we can open the windows at night instead.  All I have to do now is install that bigger inverter so we can run the Tassimo coffee machine!