We recently got a used Safari Condo Alto teardrop trailer. It has some electrical problems.<\/p>\n
You know how Occam’s razor tells us that when something is broken, it is probably only one part that’s broken? Occam was an optimist<\/strong>. I’ve solved 2 of the 3 problems with the electrical system.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Problem 1<\/strong>:\u00a0I did a few test runs and the\u00a0fully charged battery system would only power the refrigerator for about six hours. Problem 2:<\/strong> When plugged in to a 110 volt outlet, the batteries took ~20 hours to charge. The\u00a0Inteli-Power Power Converter had also been set to lead-acid batteries! I switched it to lithium iron phosphate and now I’m charging at 350 watts instead of 100 watts! (I fixed this about 10 minutes ago so I -assume- I’m good to go on that one.<\/p>\n Problem 3<\/strong>: unsolved so far. The solar panels charge the batteries at about 5 watts when they should be charging at about 150 watts. My current theory is that I need to move the RV to be in more direct sunlight. I’ll try that tomorrow.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I called a mobile RV repair person two weeks ago. He contacted me twice but he’s\u00a0too busy to visit. So I banged my head against the beautiful shiny walls of the RV.<\/p>\n We just purchased a Honda Pilot and we’re planning on going camping this weekend, Memorial Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We recently got a used Safari Condo Alto teardrop trailer. It has some electrical problems. You know how Occam’s razor tells us that when something is broken, it is probably only one part that’s broken? Occam was an optimist. I’ve solved 2 of the 3 problems with the electrical system. Problem 1:\u00a0I did a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11626,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11625\/revisions\/11626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI spent several days running the fridge or hair dryer hooked up to an inverter and staring at the Victron controls. Finally, I figured out that the Victron battery monitoring system had been set to measure lead-acid batteries, causing it to display inappropriate warnings and power-down things inappropriately! I switched the settings on the Victron to measure lithium iron phosphate instead of lead acid and ta-da! Problem solved!
\nI ran a test yesterday and project 24 hours of run time instead of 6 hours.
\nI spent much of the weekend draining and charging the\u00a0batteries, thinking they were the culprits but both of these 100 amp-hour batteries were good for at least 80 amp-hours.<\/p>\n