Over the past week I've been working to change out my old stock 45 amp converter located in the middle of the trailer in the electrical panel. Because of the distance to the battery, the volt drop was rather significant and I found my batteries took too long to charge., and never really fully charged.
I purchased a Go Power GPC-75 converter charger. I wired an outlet into the under the bed storage by fishing a 14/2 BX cable through the spare knockouts in the frame under the trailer. By opening the plastic underbelly cover where the motor for the slide out resides, it was easy to fish the wire all the way to the front. Then I fed the wire up into the storage bay. I removed the old converter that was connected to the third breaker in the electrical distribution panel, and wired the new outlet into that existing breaker. I ran 9' of each red and black #2 AWG welding cable to the battery bank (which I also upgraded to two Trojan T-125 batteries).
At the same time, I installed new 2/0 welding cable from the same under bed storage area to connect my Motomaster 1000 Watt PS inverter to the batteries. I wired the inverter to a single outlet mounted inside the trailer so that I could just connect whatever device I needed 120v power for.
The charger fired up right away with ZERO fan noise during the bulk charge at 14.6 volts. No volt drop recorded at the battery. The batteries were pretty much fully charged so it only took about 30 mins to drop down to absorption charge at 13.6 volts. After about another 30 mins it dropped down to 13.1 volts.
I ran a few lights on in the trailer and the radio all day and the the batteries were still running at night when I got home. Should be able to make a few days camping without having to charge, but if I do have to charge with the Genny I should be able to fully charge within the 2 hour generator run time rules. I left room on my plywood mount area to add solar later, but at the moment we do a lot of camping in the heavily treed provincial parks on Vancouver Island so I don't know if solar will work for us. If anyone has any experience with solar in treed areas I'd be really happy to here from you!
Happy camping!
Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk
Linear Mode
