#Trimetric battery monitor how to#

Many Roadtreks have a TV and sound system that runs off an inverter rather than 12 VDC – if you have this, be sure to account for the power it uses when you look at your daily needs. If you use an inverter (or inverters), you will likely need more than a single battery. Our TV also ran off of 12 volts rather than through an inverter. We discovered we could save a lot of power by buying 12 VDC car adapters for the laptops instead. We originally ran our laptops off a small 150 watt inverter. Inverters convert 12 VDC to 120 VAC, but they use a lot of power doing it. First, we had one house battery (a conventional deep cycle Group 24 Exide of 80 amp hours) and adding more would not be easy. Our existing equipment was one driving influence. We had a couple of years of traveling with the battery monitor and enough experience with the other methods for recharging batteries (driving, shore power hookup and generator) to evaluate the benefits of solar for our situation. Those idiot lights for battery level on the stock control panel are not quite worthless, but pretty close to it.

#Trimetric battery monitor how to#

If you are considering solar, first buy a good battery monitor and learn how much power you are using (we use a Trimetric – see our post on how to install one). We had already installed a battery monitor three years earlier, so we had a good idea of how much power we used on a daily basis. Your needs may be different, but we will discuss our thought process and what we did. We addressed that question for ourselves a year ago. So what about the rest of us? Does solar make sense and how much solar do we need? But most of us are not full-timers like Campskunk, nor do we have a compressor fridge to keep powered like Jim Lever, nor do we have banks of 8 batteries to keep charged like eTrek owners. Then there are the factory installed solar systems like on the eTrek. Campskunk’s and Jim Lever’s systems come to mind. We have seen impressive solar systems on Roadtreks and read about others.