Aluminum Camper Forum

I'm looking into getting this done, but I'm not seeing how you mounted the internal unit. Any chance you have pics of that?

This is all awesome info, any chance you could post the unit model?

VERY interested in this. have you seen your total watts used? can you give more deets on your outside install? I curently run 630 watts of solar, and could expand up to 2000w really easily. Minisplit is about the only way i could run AC off solar.

I have a camper cover for a 2013 16DBS. I use covered storage and don't have much need for this. Free to anyone who wants to pick it up or just pay shipping. I'm in Austin TX.

I need one, maybe 2 if you do find any. One is the kitchen one is bedroom on a 2013 16dbs

wait there's another livin lite owner in atx? thats where i live too! if theres ever a tx livin lite group camp, count me in!

If anyone is looking for lithium batteries at a better price, I carry Zpro lithium's at my kayak shop https://nobaddayskayak.com. I don't have them listed right now as I just launched a new site and am swapping over the inventory system, but just shoot me an email at support@nobaddayskayak.com and I can get some out to you. They should be on my site in the next week or two. The Zpros are designed and warehoused here in Texas by a UT PhD grad. The best thing is like the battleborns the Zpro's have electronics built into them that allows you to do a drop in replacement without having to upgrade your on board converter/charger. In fact, the charge profile was also designed to be similar to lead acid batteries. The second best thing is they are a bit cheaper. I can ship these anywhere in the US, the shipping is out of Austin TX. The 100aH 12v battery is 27 pounds in case you want to price out shipping. List price on the 100Ah 12v is $750, but I'm happy to give fellow aluminum camper owners a 10% discount!

More on the batteries:
These are a completely unique design, not just a bunch of off the shelf cylindrical cells wired together like battleborn. They use a custom prismatic cell, and I believe the 100ah 12v batteries are 4 cells. They have an 8 year warranty and greater than 2000 cycles at 100% depth of discharge. They also carry the ip65 water resistant rating. You can read more about the batteries here: https://www.zprolithium.com/products/zpro-12v100ah-lithium-battery

More about me:
Outdoor enthusiast, software engineer, business owner. Happy owner of a 2013 16dbs (purchased on this forum!). I spend about 6 months a year in my camper, all boondocking. I very rarely stay in a campground. I've got a 630 watt solar setup with a victron charger. Initial batteries setup was two golf cart batteries, now I have a 100ah zpro lithium. Stock internal converter/charger. I'm happy to talk about my setup. Profiling your power needs was the most important step for me. Happy to share my experience!

Forgive me if my thoughts aren't too organized here, I'm fuming. I'm hoping there's something I don't under stand that y'all may shed light on.

I just paid a pretty penny for a brake job. They replaced the brake assemblies completely. When I go to pick up there trailer, there are practically no brakes. I normally run the gain around 3.5 for this trailer. But now even if I turned the gain up to 10, the trailer can't even hold the truck back from idling forward. Over the next 45 mins I was told many ridiculous things from the shop, but never that they'd fix the issue. They finally said there was a break in period. They use lippert parts, so I look up the lippert burnish procedure. It states to get the truck up to 40 mph, then have the trailer brakes slow you down to 20-ish, no engine brake, no truck brake. I tried this with no effect. Where I store my trailer is about 20 miles away, I kept trying with no luck. Everyone else I talked to that has had a brake job done reports that brakes worked post brake job, but did take 100 miles or so to get a consistent gain setting. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Trailer is a 2013 16DBS, tow vehicle is a 2021 tundra long bed.

I've had a couple friends saved by a TPMS recently, so I figured I'd get one too. One thong I've seen is the added weight on the vavle stem wears out the rubber valve stems pretty quick. There's also talk of steel valve stems corroding an alloy or aluminum wheel over time, but a proper O ring preventing that, etc. To avoid all the possible faults, I've found some aluminum valve stems. My question is simple: is there anything about the wheels on a 2013 16DBS that would prevent these from installing properly? 

https://fifteen52.com/products/fifteen52-aluminum-valve-stems?variant=12955008761922

Batteries -  are two 6v golf cart batteries from costco, 210AH.
Solar - panels are ridiculous, i got two 305 watt house panels used for 100 bucks.  Higher voltage, but doing great so far. Very cumbersome, do not recommend. Especially for folks that move a lot. Working well for me though. They fit perfectly in my dinette
Charge controller  - is a victron mppt 150|70. Just about the only thing i didn't go cheap on.
Battery monitor - is the renogy recommended earlier in this post.
cables - I made all my cables. It was cheaper and has a perfect fit!
Most is mounted in a 12X12 pvc box you get at Lowes. I vented and made it watertight.  Towed through hellacious storm, no signs of water ingress. Was very nervous about my design.

According to my charge controller I spent 1h30mins in bulk, 2hrs in absorption, then 3hrs50min at float. My battery was at 159Ah when i turned solar on today at around 11am local time. It got all the way up to 207Ah. Once out of bulk I charged my nikon, go pro, laptop, rc glider battery, as well as powered my wifi internet and cell booster. total energy delivered according to the victron mppt app was 1.05kWh.  Wish I had more battery, but just didn't have the cash.

Just wanted to update everyone that helped out.  I'm on solar full time at this point, and things are going great. Over the last couple days my batteries got the lowest they've been due to cloud cover. (75% according to the battery monitor). Today my panels were outputting 417 watts during the bulk charging phase, but by noon were only outputting 280 watts. I notice I'm in the absorption phase and plugged in as many things to charge as i could.  Solar output jumped up to just over 400 watts and there's still ~210 watts/14.5 amps getting put into the batteries.

I'm working remote and will be full time boondocking for the next few months!

Wanted to get the experts opinions on running cables for 12v outlets. I think the easiest place to run them on on my rig would be where the cook top is. My main question is about the azdel paneling. I see using razor blade or exacto knife looks like the best way to cut it. Is removing the panel to run the cable an option? Or is that more work than it's worth? Below is a video I took over the weekend when I was getting ready to do the runs, but figured I'd better ask yall first. If cutting a hole closer to the edge of the counter is better to run the wires, I can do that, then cover that hole with my battery monitor.



https://youtu.be/pqPectP288o



Also, I'm not seeing any tank level indicators, how are yall judging how much fresh water yall have left?

First off, this is great insight regarding the 400watt panels, 400Ah battery's, the generator, etc. This is exactly what I need to hear. Thank you a ton for the input.

Secondly, I should have definitely but everything in amp hours. Many Apologies. Here's the numbers round 2 only in Ah:

AC power (but represented in 12v DC amp hours, this includes the loss from the inverter):
guitar amp: 1-2 hours daily @ 4.1 amps (call it 5 to be safer) - 10Ah


DC Power:
laptop use - 40Ah. 10 hours daily. Internal Battery lasts me ~4-6 hours.  It usually charges in 2 hours assume a 10 amp draw while charging. call it 4 hours of charging a day to be safe.
radio: - 60Ah. This number is likely way high, but I'm unable to test for a couple weeks, so I'd rather err high.
cell booster: 15Ah. (based on 10 hours of daily use at 12v. should be here today, can test and verify.)
hotspot - 10Ah. it has a 4.4Ah battery and clams to last 24 hours, but lets assume i charge it more often and say 10Ah to be more realistic.

total: 135Ah for personal needs. Unsure what the trailer will burn. I'll try to test that this weekend.

Other questions:
The stock converter on these, I assume it's single stage so charging a larger battery bank will just take longer. Is that accurate?

Are people just using the batteries exclusively to run everything, and the solar panels exclusively to charge the batteries? Does anyone use the panels to do other things when the batteries get to the absorption and float stage? Is this even worth considering?

I want to run 12v some lines internally for things like charging the laptop, access point, and running the cell booster. Any tips or tricks here?

@Chappy133 I love good bluegrass, but for what I do I'd much prefer my electric. If you haven't checked out Jake Workman yet, he's a beast!

Ok I have some hard numbers now, and boy was I surprised. I though for sure I'd done something wrong, but now I'm pretty confident it's correct.

I used an Ah counter similar to the one @DavidM listed, and a cheap off the shelf 300 watt car inverter. The device I used was provided by a friend of mine who's big into fishing, and used this to watch his batteries for his trawling motor. He's in between boats so let me borrow it for the day. It's called an SG200 from balmar. I love telemetry and this thing is pretty cool. It shows amp draw in pretty close to real time. Yall probably know all about this already though, so lets see the data:

DC test:
Kemper guitar amp draw when loud: 4.1 amps, solid.
Kemper guitar amp with speaker unplugged and headphones used: 3.8 amps, solid.
Macbook charger (battery at 38% and charging): 6-11 amps!!

I did not expect theses results at all. I was sure the main draw would be my guitar amp. The macbook charger fluctuating wildly really confused me. Maybe it just didn't like the inverter? I then decided to see if this behavior translated to the kill-a-watt. They did almost directly:

AC test:
Kemper loud: 26.3 watts, 378 Milli Amps - solid (occasionally would show 379 milli amps, no matter how i played.)
Macbook pro charger (battery now at 32% and charging) 60-90 watts, 579-853 milli amps! 

I was unable to watch the current and wattage at the same time, but that'ss the range I saw when testing it.  In both cases the guitar amp was rock solid and the macbook charger was all over the place. I'm pretty surprised but these results, but fairly confident they're accurate. I found forums of boaters that reported heavy draws on laptops, and they recommend using a 12v charger for the macbook. I found a couple that are desinged to handle the 100 watt load of my laptop, so that help a little bit.

So after all this, here are my numbers:

AC power:
guitar amp: 1-2 hours daily @ 4.1 amps (call it 5 to be safer)


DC Power:
laptop use: 10 hours daily. Internal Battery lasts me ~4-6 hours.  It usually charges in 2 hours assume a 10 amp draw while charging. call it 4 hours of charging a day?
radio: variable, up to 6 hours a day. I don't crank it, but I do plan on adding a 120 watt sub. with that, I think a 10 amp draw is possible. I may get a battery powered bluetooth speaker though. lots of things like this for sale in austin right now for the same price as a sub: https://www.amazon.com/JBL-Partybox-Portable-Wireless-Bluetooth/dp/B07VHTF419
cell booster: 1.5 amps, 10 hours daily
hotspot: no idea? 1 amp with 6 hours charge time daily?

I'm getting 135 amps a day, plus whatever the trailer needs. If I had a system that gave me 200 amp hours available a day, do you think I'd be set? That means I'd need 400 Amphour's worth of battery unless i go lithium, correct? If I had 400 watts of solar panels, would I see enough power from them to recharge? What kinda of charger would I need? On the inverter, do I need to size that for the system's capability, or my usage needs?

Thanks again for all the input on this. I'm not sure solar will happen, but I'd at least like to know what it'd take to make it happen.

hoo wee, crunching more numbers here. It almost seems impossible with unsealed batteries. If we assume that four 6v batteries would have enough power for me, i'd be adding 240 lbs close to the tongue. That kinda forces me to lithium or AGM for ventless mounting options, which in turn may price me out of this setup. A single smaller solar panel to keep the battery charged and running the generator when i wanna play is looking to be a lot cheaper.