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Building electrical system custom 3500 stick/cummings/C

gunfighter8
Explorer
Explorer
Moved Born Free sales shell onto extended frame of Ram 3500 stick/cummings.First test drive 215 miles, 70-80, 17.3MPG!!!
Now into gen setup. Planning on 120V lights, computer,Tv,coffeepot, with 2 deep cycle 12V house bank. Need advice on realistic Inverter size. I am toying with 2000 pure sine wave.
Tiny diesel gen will power AC and charge ..Only using inverter TV and nite lites,coffee in AM without starting gen.
THose of you who have userd an inverter system, is the 2000 enough?.will it run items listed ok??
If the nite lites,2x100W, TV,run for 3 hours,then computer for 2 hours, coffeepot for 30 minutes,will the 2000 drain the bank too much??
Appreciate any input..
3 REPLIES 3

DrewE
Explorer
Explorer
100W for lights seems like an awful lot of power...the "100W equivalent" LED bulbs actually consume about 15W.

So you have 30W times maybe four hours for lights (120 Wh), plus 3 hours times maybe 30W for the TV (90 Wh), plus maybe 40W for a laptop times two hours (80Wh), or a total of 390 Wh at night, call it 400 Wh. These are all reasonably light loads; a 300W inverter would be plenty here.

The coffee maker is rather an unknown; they vary quite a bit in power usage. Small individual ones might be around 300W or so, larger or faster ones could be a good bit more. This could be 250 Wh maybe, or 550 Wh total. If you have a propane stovetop, you can use it to make the coffee and save a good chunk of your power usage.

A pair of 6V golf cart batteries store about 2600 Wh, but you really should not use more than half that, or a little over 1000 Wh. (This would be your most economical house battery choice, in my opinion, in the long term. They'll last longer than a pair of 12V batteries.) So you should be OK there for a single night, maybe two, before charging.

It will take a few hours at least to fully, or nearly fully, recharge the battery bank, using a decent fairly high-current charger or converter (basically just different names for the same thing). Some inverters are inverter/chargers and have this function built in.

I would suggest using 12V lights rather than 120V lights; and more generally, you'll have better efficiency if you can run things directly on 12V power rather than converting it to 120V power and then back to lower voltage DC. Some TVs can also be easily wired to run on 12V, as can some (fewer) laptops.

What are you planning on doing for a fridge? water pump? furnace? Ventilation fan? Water heater? Usually there are a fair few other 12V loads in an RV that you don't seem to be considering at all. Many of them are relatively low usage, though an RV furnace can use a good bit of power in cold weather. A residential (120V compressor) fridge also uses a relatively large amount of power; an RV fridge running on propane uses a quite small amount for the control circuitry.

Anyhow, a decent 2000W inverter would be sufficient for this, and indeed just about anything you can plug into a single normal household outlet. The main limitation on how much you can practically use and for how long is the battery bank you have.

How tiny of a tiny diesel generator are you thinking of? And by powering "AC," do you mean air conditioner or just Alternating Current power? If a roof-mounted RV air conditioner, much less than around 3000 W will be pretty iffy. Battery charging could be another 500 to 1000 W, depending on the size of the charger. I guess I'm trying to say you probably don't want to go too tiny here.

ScottG
Nomad
Nomad
It's a "Cummins".

path1
Explorer
Explorer
Can't help with elec but sure sounds like an interesting project. I'm getting 12 pulling trailer. Every now and then I Google up "chassis mounted" campers. They sure good imo.
2003 Majestic 23P... Northwest travel machine
2013 Arctic Fox 25W... Wife "doll house" for longer snowbird trips
2001 "The Mighty Dodge"... tow vehicle for "doll house"