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Dry Camping 101 – Help
For the first time in 3 years of owning the coach, I won’t be going from 50 amp service to 50 amp service. I’ll be drying camping for 5 days north of Detroit. I understand I can run the generator during the day and have all the power needed at my disposal. And we’ll shut the generator off at night and monitor our usage.
What settings should I be aware for any of the systems? Thank you.
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4 Replies
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Jimmy,
First thing is shut your inverter remote panel door, don’t touch them. When you shut down make sure the electric water heater is off. Your water pump will automaticly switch to the 12 v pump.
About all you can run thru the night is your fridge which will be fine and a couple lights and a tv or two for a while. If you pulled the halogens and have led lighting thats a bonus.
You can learn to monitor your amp usage by leaving your front dash techlink screen on thru the night. Go to the 12v and 24 v screen, it will be green. The bottom of that screen shows amp usage, a couple of lights and a tv will be a a few amps. This will help you determine how strong your house batteries are too. As the night goes on and if you get up to piss you glance up front and see the techlink screen to see if its green yellow or red.
I can stay in the green for about 8 to 10 hours going this route. There are other ways to do it but this is a easy way for you to monitor your usage and learn how things work.
As you know you have a couple choices to look at your techlink screens, I just like the front for my preference.
If you get stuck call me.
Later
bv
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You can also monitor your remotes as in the picture, just start the gen when reaching 24 volts and run it as long as necessary to get to float voltage. Then repeat as needed.
Bernie’s suggestion is also good, but my 12/24 Techlink voltage is not accurate, so I rely on the monitors.
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I want to emphasize Tom’s comment. I have several places to monitor values on my coach. Those values include house and chassis battery voltages. They do not agree with one another so I have had to determine which information is more correct and use the other less accurate readings as reference only.
That mis-information is not limited to electrical values. It also relates to temperatures and pressures so rather than get wrapped up in trying to determine precise values and correction factors I just determine what “normal” is and then I only get concerned if I see variations from those “normal” values.
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One thing to know…. if you have AutoGen On… it might be waking you up with a danger sounding beeping sound at 5AM.
I’ve been woken up a couple of times!
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