After eight days of minimal/no sun our 220 ah (110 usable) batteries are getting so low we are using our Weber catalytic heater at night. At my friend's place in San Antonio we had no sun, but thought traveling to Del Rio to camp three nights would charge up the batteries. Not so, three additional straight days of cloud cover at Del Rio we were below 11.8 v.
In 350 nights this is the first time for this scenario, but conserving electricity was not the reason we bought 110 useable ah's of battery.
Over the past two years we have easily taken out 100 pounds of needless crap (mostly tools), so we have room and weight for a second battery. We're probably going to go with
SiO2 from Azimuth Solar at $550 delivered to our friend's place in Tucson. The SiO2 uses the same charging profile as lithium. We love to camp in cold weather, many times below 20F where Battleborn has issues.
For the time being I would install a battery switch to go between our AGM and SiO2. We would mainly use the AGM hooked to our 170 watt solar on the roof and the SiO2 connected to our 100 watt Renogy portable using our Victron 100/20 controller. In other words, two separate systems connected to our 5.0 with a
Blue Sea battery selector. This will provide us two separate systems with redundancy.
Later on we would replace the ETI GoPower solar controller with a Victron 100/30 controller for the rooftop panel(s) that are hooked to our AGMs. Also at some time, we would add a lithium 110v converter charger to the camper for the SiO2.
Being dyslexic I sometimes miss something. I also have a tendency to write this stuff missing important data.
Am I on the right track?
Thanks,
Perry