How to thrive on a non 240v site!

There's all sorts of development underway in fuel cell technology. We aren't quite there yet though.

As a computer hardware and electrical engineer myself I consider LiFePo4 batteries to be a very good fit for a leisure battery, at least for me. The batteries I'm using have integrated battery management systems and that is where the maximum draw rate comes from. 

A friend has a custom made battery pack that can run his air conditioning as well as his full computer setup. He's been running it for over 4 years and has lost only 3% of the capacity.  His previous lead acid bank was well maintained but could not run his air conditioning and  failed after 3 years. Admittedly he's in a big bus conversion and has space for the inverters and batteries, but still, it shows that LiFePo4 is a good fit. 

Hi Merve, I hate to be the bringer of disagreement but "someone on YouTube did research" does not bode well for credibility of the results.

Our bodies have evolved over many millions of years to handle most things in our environment and have excellent ways of disposing of many toxins we might consume .

Your body doesn't become acidic because the water you drink might be acidic otherwise we'd be absorbing the hydrochloric acid from our stomachs and sweating acid. What about fruit and meat and all the other things we might eat that contain acid/alkaline in various strengths?

I'm afraid there's a lot of mumbo jumbo about all these things on the internet with so-called "research" that has not been peer reviewed or verified scientifically.  

Our tap water is some of the safest in the world, tested multiple times daily for any contaminants or bacteria/viruses etc.

Obviously we all have our own ideas and actions, but spending large amounts of money to filter and distill water that is already safe to drink is a bit of a waste. Did you know that distilling water can actually concentrate any volatile organic compounds in the distilled water as they have a lower boiling point than water? That's something we were taught and demonstrated in science class at school. 

Have we got to the point where we should have a separate thread for Water?  Getting off Topic here! 

Sorry for the detour into water, hopefully it wasn't too deep.  

Although im a bit mad with my power setup I still do some things to help when not on EHU.  I do the normal thing of pre-chilling the fridge with as many frozen things as I can (milk, sausages etc.) and then as things thaw during my time away I use them. Turning my fridge to maximum while driving and then turning it down when I arrive on site helps a lot.

Another power saving idea is to have a cooler with some ice in it, and then cover it with a damp towel and keep it in the shade under the awning or van where the evaporating water from the towel will help keep the cooler cold.  Putting a bit (a small heap) of table salt in the ice water will lower the temperature quite a lot. 

All my bulbs are LED, I have 12v to USB chargers for all my gadgets apart from my laptop which I managed to get a 12v adapter for. Saves having to have an inverter for all those little "wall wart" power adapters. 

If you're going out on day trips it might be worth using that time to charge your gadgets from the cigarette lighter socket in your car/motorhome if you can, thus saving your battery a little bit. 

I find it interesting that Mothers of New Born Babies here are issued with bottled water (to make the milk with!).  

No doubt such a filter would be set up to find CLs with EHU rather than without. 

I don't use CLs but when I did I looked for CLs in an area. I suspect that if I wanted a CL near Aberdeen for example I would probably get no more than 8 options to consider.

Just so.
I'm far too new here to get involved in CC politics and don't intend to, but I have joined mainly to gain information on caravanning and what we can do to enjoy it.

I'd really hope to find a section in the Advice and Information part of the website with downloadable info, just like the really useful stuff on how to tow, set up, etc. which for beginners like me is superb.

There's a growing acceptance that whatever the fossil fuel companies and their tame politicians (the orange one included) would like us to believe, our only intelligent future is to depend less & less on the extracted stuff, and more and more on what are still seen as alternative ways of producing energy.
Otherwise the planet will probably survive quite well, but Hom Sap will likely not be part of its fauna. (Not sapient enough!)

Meanwhile, more info here on how to have a cheaper greener holiday would be great, and would save us having maybe to migrate elsewhere to find it.

Thanks Merve - it'll be a while before I get into serious questions. As I've said before, I'm still in the very theoretical stage, as we've yet to take our first trip in the 'van, which will be mid-March. Once we've learned to work our little Rapido as it is, we'll have more idea of how we'd like to adjust it, then there will be questions!  But since I'm clearly not the only one wanting to know, hopefully there'll be lots more questions from others on the same course.

... though one to go on with, just me thinking way ahead, but which is possibly already buried somewhere in the previous 109 messages, concerns the inverter. The one we have for our home's 16 solar roof panels is the size of a respectable suitcase. Our caravan is already tiny enough without taking up too much storage space with more gear, so how big is the box for a caravan sized inverter?

Thanks Pippah45. Safefill here we come, I reckon.
Meanwhile,  roughly how big is that inverter, please? ... on a scale either of actual cm / inches  or soup tin / cereal packet/ suitcase units

Now these are units of measurement I can appreciate! In due time I'm going to be asking more about how it gets fitted into the system, but I reckon even our tiny van could accommodate something that size.