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Advice needed about Bus air
I’ve been looking at several prevost 2001 2000 to 2003 2004 RVs and I had a question about air-conditioning. It seems to me that the best combination for air-conditioning is the bus air with compressor in the rear and the rooftop air-conditioning units working off of the generator. This way if one or the other fails you have a good back up air
thanks Dr Gary
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1 Reply
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OTR is something that is going to bring about debate because some owners feel very strongly about which is best, me included.
Let’s start with numbers. A Prevost OTR system puts our somewhere between 90,000 and 106,000 BTU. It was designed to keep 50 passengers who are giving off heat, in central AZ in August comfortable. When such a system is installed on a coach it is expensive, and it takes up the equivalent of 1/2 of a bay so the market place does not necessarily embrace an OTR coach.
But those are the numbers to keep in mind.
An alternative to an OTR whole coach system is to rely on the house A/C units. Mostly there are two types. One is the 2 piece Cruisair heat pumps, or as an alternative there are the roof mounted RV type. The numbers here are in the range of 13,000 to 15,000 BTU to keep things cool for one unit. Generally a 40 foot coach will have three, and a 45 foot coach will have four of these units for a total BTU output of between 52,000 to 60,000.
Most coaches that exclude OTR and are only provided with house units will not allow more than one or two units to operate from inverters. If the need is to have the entire coach cool then the solution is to run the generator and turn on all units.
From experience I know if there is no OTR, and the coach has gotten hot inside during the day, every single roof or Cruisair running will take an excessive amount of time to overcome the heat put out by everything in the coach that has gotten hot. We were in 95 temps during the day on one trip and the camp ground lost power and our coach got very hot inside. We started the generator and ran all four units and it was midnight before the coach got comfortable. If we ran the OTR we would have had almost twice the cooling power and we would have gotten comfortable faster.
Having both OTR and roof units is in my opinion ideal because one will back up the other. We have Cruisairs and if the OTR fails, sometimes the heat radiating from the highway can overcome the condensing units and little if any A/C is available. Roof units are in relatively cooler air so they will perform better on hot summer days. Their downside is noise level.
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