Tag: victron energy

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First Boondocking experiences after installing Solar on the RV

Let the testing begin!    Our first camping trip after I installed 640 watts of flexible Renogy solar panels and a Victron 100/50 charge controller was at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta campground October 3rd till the 14th.     We had signed up for an Escapee’s HOP (Head Out Program)  late last year when I couldn’t find more than a couple days in a row of available reservations.  Turns out they open the Balloon Fiesta Camping reservations up about a week after the last one ends so I was a couple months late to the party.  Luckily I found the ad for the HOP and they had a few openings.  I reserved a spot right then.

Fast forward ten months and we were camping there with our barely tested new solar panels charging our house batteries.    First thing I noticed was around noon the first full day there, they stopped charging the battery.  I checked the side compartment with the charge controller and I saw that one of the breakers on the battery side of the controller had tripped.  The devices I bought were supposed to be 50 amp breakers,  but from what I could tell, it tripped around 30 amps.  Not a good sign.  I clicked it back on and we started charging again.  

I started researching breakers and determined that I probably should have bought 60 amp breakers for that part of the circuit and better quality ones.   So I started calling local distributors, but none had them in stock, so I gave up for a bit.  

Next day it happened again, the same breaker tripped.  I could see this was going to be a chronic problem unless I replaced it.  Again I started looking online for a replacement and at the same time wondered where I could have it delivered.   After all, I was in a sea of RV’s.  No way for UPS to find us. 

A few  days went by while I called just about every electronic and electrical supply house within 90 miles of Albuquerque.    I also kept googling.  And then unexpectedly about 30 pages of results later, I found an ad for a 60amp breaker at an unlikely place called Sportsman’s Warehouse.   I called their local store, and to my surprise, they had a bunch in stock!   That afternoon I drove over and bought one immediately.   Turns out they were in the fishing section of the store for trolling motors, MinnKota MKR-19 Circuit Breaker 60A.   I replaced the faulty breaker that afternoon.  

Of course, once that was in place, the next day the breaker I had previously installed on the negative side of the circuit tripped.  I had only put that breaker on there as a switch so I could turn off both the negative and positive sides of the circuit.  Humbug!  So I went back to the store and bought a second one and installed that on the negative side of the circuit.   The issue with these particular breakers for me was no button to trip them manually, which is one of the main reasons I bought the problematic ones.  They had a button to press to trip them, so in effect they were also a switch.   I had seen other solar install pictures online where those same cheap breakers were used for solar hookups, so I figured they would work.   Geez,  was that a wrong assumption.

By now we are just a couple days from the end of the fiesta, so I decided to shop for one online that had the manual trip lever to install prior to us leaving for our next trip.   I eventually pulled the trigger on the Bussmann CB185-60 breaker and had it shipped to the house once we arrived back home.   I will be leaving the MinnKota on the other side of the circuit till I can find a suitable surface mount switch.

Now that I was no longer tripping breakers, I could really see what the panels were capable of.   One of the days I happened to look at the console and see over 540 watts of power being generated and almost 40 amps going to the batteries.  That was pretty amazing because the panels are flat mounted on the RV roof and the sun was getting low in the sky as it’s the middle of October.    Solar panels should be angled toward the sun for optimum production, but I decided early on in my research that I wasn’t climbing up on the roof to tilt them up and put them down each time we moved.   Once I committed to flexible panels that was fairly moot anyway.

While we were there, I experimented using the generator in the morning to charge the batteries up to around 80% SOC (state of charge), which is around the point the onboard charger drops out of bulk charging mode.  At that point I shut the generator down to let the solar panels attempt to top the batteries off during the rest of the sunny day.  Only using the generator while the charger is in bulk mode should be the most efficient use of the diesel generator.   Once the charging switches from bulk into the absorb charging mode, the charge amperage drops fairly quickly.  Even when the charger is only pushing 10 amps into the batteries, the generator seems to be under the same load as when it’s charging them at 125 amps in bulk.

I am now starting to more fully understand the difficulty of fully charging our batteries via solar . Adding more panels will help, but in reality I probably can’t fit enough panels on the roof of my RV to get it done in the middle of winter. 

The chemistry of batteries prevent them accepting the full amperage of the panels once they get above 80% charged state where the controller shifts into absorption mode.   More panels will get you to 80% quicker, but then the battery chemistry kicks in and effectively starts pushing back and the controller starts dropping the amperage going to them.  So if you calculated you could push 40 amps for 4-6 hours of the day (240 AH) and less AH before and after those hours, then in theory I figured we can push all those AH into the batteries during those six hours,  but that’s not reality.  As soon as those batteries hit around 80% SOC, the amount of charge accepted quickly drops.  So if your batteries are depleted below 80% SOC,  say at 60% SOC, you can really push in those amps for a while; but when they hit that 80% threshold, the amps  drop, and they drop in an almost linear line down to just a few amps and then hit float charging.

My experiment running the generator in the morning was my charge controller switched from bulk charging to float charging way too quickly, almost no time was spent in the absorb phase of charging from the panels, which should be the bread and butter of solar.   I started to search for an answer to that, and what I found out so far was the amount of time the charge controller stays in absorb is determined by the voltage the charge controller sees when it wakes up due to first sunlight in the morning.  The higher the voltage it sees when it wakes up, the shorter the time it stays in the absorb phase; and the generator made the controller see much higher voltage when it woke up, so the absorption time was cut to almost nothing.  

But that was learned a bit too late in the game, so this will continue when we dry camp in Quartzsite the middle of January.

 

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Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta

This post has been a long time coming..   We arrived at the Balloon Fiesta a few days early to join up with the Escapees’ group,  a first time with that club.   Our area was at the extreme south end of the Balloon Fiesta RV camping lot.   Really it’s just a big dirt lot that we were told in prior era was the Albuquerque dump.   There were a lot of plastic pipes strategically placed sticking up a few inches for someone to open and monitor what was going on below.   When we received the park rules prior to arriving, I was wondering about the rule where it was a requirement to keep your generator or BBQ two feet off the ground.   Now, with the understanding of potential methane seepage from the ground, it all made sense.

You couldn’t believe how close everyone was parked to each other!   Our spots were 20′ wide, but they seemed much smaller.   We lucked out as the coach to our right (passenger side) decided to park way over to the right of their space, giving us about 4 extra feet of space on that side.   I had folded our outdoor carpet so we didn’t go past our space’s sideline; but when the next motorhome pulled in a few days later, I went back and stretched our carpet back out to its full width and still had a couple more feet of room for the patio.

We also got to get some real world testing of the new solar panels,  installed just prior to heading to this event.   They worked better than expected except for a lot of nuisance tripping of the 50 amp breakers I had installed.   Those breakers just weren’t up to the task and kept tripping at around 30 amps of power going into the batteries.  I had a difficult time finding new flush mount circuit breakers while here in ABQ, but eventually found some in stock at an unlikely place called Sportsman’s Warehouse.   Turns out, what I needed was also used for trolling motors and were found in the fishing department of the store.   I installed them and the tripping issue disappeared.  The only problem I found with the new breakers was I could not manually trip them.  So I ordered a new  Bussmann CB185-60 breaker from Amazon when we got home.  These have a way to manually trip them when I want to disconnect the panels from the batteries.

Anyway, back to the Balloon Fiesta.    Our group had a tent where they served breakfast and dinner most of the days we were there.   As the balloons go up starting at dawn, the breakfast serving began at 5am.   Very early for a retired guy to be awake.   But we did make it for about 1/2 the morning breakfasts,  or at least I did.  🙂

. The opening day of the fiesta we took the shuttle bus over to the field.  Thankfully the buses have a road of their own to travel back and forth from the campground to the launch field.  If they didn’t, it might have taken hours to get there.  The traffic was astonishing for that time of the morning,  everyone trying to drive there in their cars at the same time.

We walked onto the field.  It was utter chaos, there were so many people packed around hundreds of balloons trying to inflate and many others already inflated.  I have never seen anything like it.   It was like some of the old music festivals I attended back in the day, there would be 1/2 a million folks on a large field.   This felt like that plus the hundreds of balloons in different states of getting ready to fly.

Then the balloons started to take off in two’s and three’s and then many more were going up at the same time.  It’s an awesome sight to see from below.   All around us were flight “zebras” blowing loud whistles letting the balloon pilots know when it’s safe to take off as the pilots cannot see anything above them due to the very large bag of hot air above them.  I guess it could be disastrous if they rose quickly into another balloon.

We took so many pictures and videos, I filled up my phone the first morning; so when we got back, I pulled them all off including all the other photos and videos to make room for lots more to be taken during the next 10 days.

If only the pictures did justice to the experience.   There were just so many balloons taking off, it was truly a spectacular sight.   I especially liked the special shapes.  I think my favorite were the three honey bees that appeared to be holding hands during their inflation.   They were a mom, dad and baby bee.  The pilots were so skillful they were able to rotate the mom and dad to make them kiss just prior to liftoff.

The Wells Fargo Stagecoach balloon was fantastic, but we never saw it fly.  Seems they just inflate it, but as far as I know it never took off any of the days.   Yoda and Darth Vader were very cool and appeared together often.  There was a large stork and a giant statue from the mountains above Rio.   My guess is there were close to 100 special shape balloons.   The big green boot was probably the oddest of the bunch.

A few of the mornings and evenings there was a lot of wind out here in the desert and the balloons didn’t fly in those conditions.  Luckily the festival has an app for your phone that lets you know what is happening so you don’t traipse over to the field at O’Dark Thirty on a morning that proves to be too windy to fly.   There were lots of other things going on next to the field after the flights, one being a chainsaw carving tournament.   After the Fiesta was over and while we were camped at the Cummins dealer, I met one of the chainsaw carvers as their coach was having turbocharger issues.

Most of the days we chose to bring our chairs over to the edge of the field next to the Escapees tent where lots of balloons end up landing when the wind was just right.    From there you can get a better perspective of the amount of balloons flying at the same time.   They told us there were 555 balloons going up.   I didn’t count them, but it looked like there were more than that.

One of the days we were over there, a balloon came back down onto the takeoff field at a very fast clip.   The zebras were frantically blowing their whistles and running around to clear out all the people from the emergency landing area before it could make its hard landing on someone’s head.   It came down with a loud thud and I didn’t see anyone get hit.  Had someone been under there, I bet there would have been a lot of broken bones to deal with.   As it was, I was wondering how the folks on board that gondola fared.   We didn’t stick around to see if any ambulances arrived, but I didn’t hear any sirens as we continued to wander around the field.

We dry camped there for 12 days, our longest boondocking so far.  When we arrived at the campground, it was very warm in the afternoons; but within a few days, the weather became quite brisk early in the mornings.  A few days it didn’t get much over 50 degrees the whole day; and a couple of the days it rained, and we got to experience some thunder and lightning.   As you know if you’ve read our past blog entries, that’s not something we get to experience much living in San Diego!

Each night after the balloon Glows there was a sky diving team dropped above the field that somehow shot off fireworks as they descended.  I had seen smoke used at other events but never fireworks.   I’m not quite sure how they were doing that, but I would imagine that it could easily go very wrong for them.  After they landed on the field, a few minutes later there were 15-20 minutes of fireworks shot off from the launch field.  We brought our chairs over to the club tent and watched them with the 30 or so Escapees members.

The last day of the event was too windy for the balloons to launch and almost too cold for a couple of San Diegans!   Everyone in the campground, about a thousand RV’s, were supposed to vacate before 11am unless you made prior arrangements to stay one more night there.   I was thinking about doing that till the weather forecast predicted “snow” for late Sunday and Monday.     I had called a bunch of local campgrounds to find a place to stay, but no one had a spot available.  Seems like quite a few of the RV’s leaving the balloon fiesta campground on Sunday morning weren’t traveling very far.

We got out of the campground around 10am and were pleasantly surprised there weren’t any issues on the roadways or even much of a line to get thru the traffic signal at the entrance.   Within a few minutes we were pulling into the local Cummins dealer’s parking lot about 6 miles south of the fiesta grounds and there wasn’t another coach in sight.  I had been wondering if it would be packed due to all the campgrounds in the area being full.   I will need to keep these types of places in mind when needing electric hookups during future travels.  We already posted  about our troubles with the coach during this trip.

Next post should be about our visit to the Petroglyph National Monument.

 

 

 

 

 

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Modifications to the RV prior to leaving for the Balloon Fiesta.

After getting back from the NW trip I had a list of things I wanted changed or added before departing for the Balloon Fiesta trip.   First modification was to move  the living room TV/Couch from the driver’s side to the passenger side, thus allowing the chairs to be moved to the larger slide behind the driver.  This switch simplifies the tasks needing to be done when arriving and departing.  Also allows someone to sit in those chairs while driving now that there are seat belts although the ottomans are normally seat-belted in.  Currently those seat belts hold on to the ottomans.  I’d hate to get hit by one of those in an emergency stop.

Next thing was to install a motion light by the inside stairs.  I happened to find something on Amazon that now after using it a few days is the perfect solution.  Motion LED light.   It’s rechargeable via a micro USB cable.  And to make it even simpler to install, it has a metal plate with 3M tape to mount it to your surface.  Then you can remove the light at any time to charge it as it’s magnetically attached to the plate you installed.   It only stays on 18 seconds, which is perfect for entering or leaving the RV.  It’s affixed to a flat surface under the passenger-side pullout drawer.  I like it so much I want to buy more, so I am trying to figure out where I need them first.

After installing that, I tackled installing some drip channel above the windshield.  A buddy told me he had done that and it really helped keep that huge piece of glass clean while parked.  Prior to adding this, water and dirt from the roof would streak down the windshield after just a day or so, making it necessary to clean it almost every day.   Since adding that a week ago, I haven’t had any dirt streaks on the windshield at all.  Now if I could only figure out a way to keep the bugs from splattering while driving!

I then drilled a large hole in the dining room cabinet to install a power tower that can pull up or close down when not needed.  The only outlet in that area was under the table, very difficult to get a plug into.    Power Pop-Up Station, three outlets      I also installed a small 8″ square piece of sheet metal on the roof to act as a ground plane for our  Cell Phone Signal Booster

The last thing I accomplished during the time between trips was to install   640 watts of solar panels on the RV roof.   Last year I installed a Bogart Trimetric Battery Meter that measures amps into and out of the house battery pack.  That helped me determine how much energy needed to be put back into the batteries after a 24-hour period,  giving me a starting point to determine what I might need.  First I built a 200w portable suitcase, documented in an earlier post last spring.   I sorted out the controller details and approximately how much wattage I needed.   I then installed a controller in the coach that was sized for the panels on the roof; but while I did more research on what panels to buy, I could use it for the portable panels I have stowed in the RV basement till I pulled the trigger on the roof- mounted panels.

Fast forward to now.   I first tested each panel with a voltmeter laying in the back of the pickup truck to see if I had any DOA panels.   Then I did what I call a “sidewalk test”, laid them out on the side walk one morning and hooked them up to the coach’s controller to see if they put out amps.

I installed 4  Renogy Flexible 160w mono solar panels, all serially connected to keep the amperage low and the voltage high, allowing for much less voltage drop on the 35′ cabling runs from the roof to the controller via the rear cap.   I wanted to line them up along the passenger side edge but there were some things sticking up on the roof that would create shadows on the panels so a couple of them were moved further inboard the others.

I used 2 tubes of Sikaflex 252 for gluing down the panels to the fiberglass roofing.  Renogy recommended that as it would stick to their ETFE material.   All in all it was a simple process to install and cable them.  The only actual difficult part was fishing the cables down thru the inside of the rear cap.   You cannot see what you are doing as all you have is a 1″ hole and it’s not a straight shot to the bottom.   I eventually found a 1/4″ x 10′ piece of threaded rod that was stiff enough and flexible enough, and long enough to come out the bottom.   Everything I had that might have worked was only 6′ long.  Not enough to come thru the bottom of the compartment where I could grab it and pull it further down and over to the Controller storage compartment.

It’s all done and it generates a lot of power!   Next week we will be dry camping at the Balloon Fiesta for 12 days.   That should give me a lot of empirical data to work with for any future modifications.

Yes,  flexible panels were more expensive than rigid panels; but after I figured in the costs of the mounts and extra time it would take to install, not to mention the piece of mind while driving down the freeway that those heavy rigid panels might have become decapitation projectiles to an unlucky car following behind….  I am very happy with my decision.   The rigid mounting brackets I wanted to use were from AM Solar, and they were about $80 per panel.

We will see how they hold up over time.