Their products, such as PATRAR, PRIMORDIAL, CUVEE EXPERIENCE, DUH and ECOU, are authentic expressions of a healthy and authentic lifestyle. At the workshops at CamperVan Fest 2024, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about the biodynamic practices that make wines so special. From the fertile and naturally balanced soils to the winemaking process without yeasts or artificial additives, you’ll understand how nature leaves its mark on every bottle.

From a biodynamic point of view, the concept means that the grapes have been obtained through agricultural processes that have not used any synthetic substances. The only substance used is copper sulphate from the mine, i.e. the naturally occurring copper sulphate, which is the copper-bearing stone. Also, the vines and grapes have developed on soils fertilized by maintaining a natural biological balance, where a great diversity of plants and insects specific to the area coexist and where human intervention is limited to specific mechanical work and planting certain species of flora designed to ensure the harmonious development of the local ecosystem;Together with the winery’s experts and a dedicated sommelier, you will explore the secrets of these wines and participate in guided tastings, enriching your knowledge and enjoying moments of good cheer. In short, at their stand you’ll find „Nature in a wine glass” and discover how respect for the environment can create wines of unparalleled quality.

If you haven’t got your festival tickets yet, now is a good time to click here

Articolul Domeniul Bogdan x CVF24 – Biodynamic wine tastings apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

During the workshop, we will test different pizza styles, from the traditional Margherita to our own creations, all baked to perfection at temperatures up to 500 °C. Participants would not only learn the theory, but also put it into practice by enjoying their own freshly baked pizza.

Ooni ovens are recognized for their ability to reach the very high temperatures needed to bake, for example, Neapolitan-style pizzas with crispy crust and fresh ingredients. These compact and portable ovens are powered by gas, wood or pellets, offering excellent flexibility in use. Thanks to their efficient and super robust design, the Ooni can reach temperatures of up to 500°C in just 15-20 minutes, ensuring fast and even baking. Easy to use and affordable, Ooni ovens have become popular with home cooking enthusiasts, professional chefs and, of course, nature lovers.

As with any festival activity, we hope to educate and inspire pizza lovers in an atmosphere full of excitement and creativity at the CampingGrill.ro booth. The workshop will be organized on Friday. By using Ooni ovens, we will enjoy the benefits of the mobility and performance of this great equipment, as well as an interactive and hands-on experience.

We hope that, after this crash course, we will go home with a lot of valuable knowledge and fond memories of good pizza, with the possibility to recreate the experience in our own kitchens. Click on the event in the first comment and catch the last few days of Early Bird Tickets to see us on August 15 at the biggest festival for adventure and travel lovers. If you haven’t got your festival tickets yet, now is a good time to click here

Articolul OONI x CVF24 – Pizza in nature workshop apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

Victron Energy are, without a doubt, market leaders in Europe in terms of the quality of the photovoltaic products and systems they produce for residential and industrial. What many people don’t know is that in 1973, the company started out with the idea of producing inverters and chargers for the marine industry, such as sailboats. These are nothing more and nothing less than aquatic campers.

Fast forward to 2022 when at the first edition of CamperVan Fest, the Darcom Energy team, importers of Victron Energy in Romania, proposed to use a photovoltaic trailer to power the central area. For those who didn’t catch the CVF22 edition, it’s a good moment to mention that during the festival it was almost continuously polluted, with small pauses so that the solar panels could feel that they didn’t come for nothing. But there was no way we could declare zero energy because we had to get a generator to keep everything running. But it was a hybrid festival and a great start to a collaboration, started at the worst possible time.

CVF23 was ALTFEL. We consulted in advance, we estimated our consumption and the Victron team asked us: „How about installing a photovoltaic park on site?”. Naturally, what could we say except a big YES. In addition to the 15kw array mounted, we had another 15kw on the PV trailer and with a third orientation on one of the Darcom Sprinterers. All this energy went daily into an 80kWh LiFePO4 LiFePO4 battery bank with a three-phase system with Quattro inverters that provided lights for the festival, power for the vendors, charging of the electric cars at the organization and electricity for the „site organization”. At the end of CVF23, when we looked on the VRM to see what Cerbo was telling us, over 500kWh was produced and consumed, 100% renewables.

The effort to build the infrastructure for a sustainable festival is not small. It took 4 days to assemble – disassemble, and the tireless Victron Energy + Darcom Energy team always made sure that everything worked perfectly. CVF24 will be a new exercise in energy independence that we are putting in place, in our ongoing quest to run an increasingly sustainable festival!

If you haven’t managed to get your CVF24 tickets, this is a great time. It takes 10 seconds and between August 15 and 18, in Râșnov, you can see the photovoltaic awesomeness that powers our festival and participate in workshops or Victron Energy raffles!

Articolul CamperVan Fest powered by Victron Energy: together for a more sustainable festival apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

Today we’re talking about toys, and it’s going to be a more, shall we say, fun episode. None of what we review today is absolutely necessary in a camper, but some of it analyzes, some of it protects, some of it makes your life easier, and some of it is just plain interesting.

We’ll start with the alternator charging. Of course, on many production cars, it’s something that comes standard. Not on overland cars or DIY vans. And it’s a topic that needs to be covered. From my point of view, alternator charging is an extremely efficient and stable source of current. If there are situations where you do or don’t have the sun, when the engine is running, the current comes in constantly. Of course, I don’t recommend camping with the engine running for 3 hours to charge the batteries. But if you move every couple of days and drive around, charging from the alternator is a relevant and constant source of energy. This charging can be done through a relay, a DC-DC or buck boost. The most common relays are from IBS, T-Max or Cyrix from Victron. There are some good solutions at a very affordable price. The DC-DC charger variant knows how to charge better and somehow in smart mode, and you can find it from Voltronic, CTEK, Victron, MasterVolt or Dometic. We don’t go into models but it’s important to know that they can charge up to 100Ah, if the alternator lets you. We have a setup like this, the Gloria being factory equipped with an enlarged 260A alternator for special uses. Clearly, all of this is limited by the main battery voltage so the 100Ah isn’t always present, but I usually charge with 50-70Ah which is brilliant anyway. Essentially they all do the same thing. Maybe we’ll get to take individual cases and discuss them at length, but as an idea, they all help you charge from the alternator and prioritize the car battery for protection. In my case, in addition to the charging direction from alternator to auxiliary, I also have a Cyrix relay placed on the reverse direction, in which I can connect the auxiliary batteries to give power to the car, if it runs out for any reason. So it goes like this and so on.

Well, what else we got? Well, there’s battery protect. Here I know of only one manufacturer, namely Victron, which has Battery Protect and Smart Battery Protect. The difference between them is that one has bluetooth and is easier to set up and check. This unit is placed on the circuit and cuts off the current from your consumers at an agreed voltage so as not to damage the batteries. Simple and to the point, but I think it’s relatively important and cheap. A general purpose battery protect is up to a hundred euros and can save much more expensive batteries.

Also in the chapter of two-terminal stuff there is the shunt or smart shunt. Any company that manufactures camping equipment, or DC in general, is going to have some version of this product, Dometic, Mastervolt, Victron, voltronic and many others. And obviously the question comes: what the hell does this shunt do so magically, as I’ve never really heard of its existence. Well, it by itself doesn’t do much, just passes current and information through it. But if you connect a screen to the shunt or connect your phone to the bluetooth, you can see a lot of information about that current: how much is flowing, how much has flowed, what is the status of the batteries and much more. It’s a very useful measuring and control device. It doesn’t sound like much but it helps to know exactly where you stand with consumers and battery power.

All the equipment we’ve talked about so far, as well as in previous episodes such as the solar controller, inverter or batteries, can be integrated into complex systems. I come back to these 3 big manufacturers Mastervolt, Victron and Dometic, who each have a version of this device. At Victron it’s called Cerbo GX, at Mastervolt DC Distribution 500 and at Dometic … I forget. But they all do the same thing, they link all the other elements and allow you to see everything that is happening anywhere, but absolutely anywhere in the system. We can look at mine, if we connect on bluetooth we have everything installed here, including we can see Cerbo here. But further inside we have a Touch GX where we can see all the information from all the stuff connected to the Cerbo GX. And, moreover we have the possibility to see and control the same parameters on the net as admins on Victron Remote Monitoring or VRM. So wherever I am, I can see how much current I have in my batteries, how much water I have in my tanks, what the inside temperature is and so on. Units somewhat like this, in fact rather Venus Gx can be configured later with more complex tasks. Example: if my batteries reach float, so as not to waste energy, turn on the electric boiler and heat the water. Or, if the temperature drops below x degrees, a relay starts my underfloor heating, or webasto. It depends from case to case. I haven’t ventured that far into configurations but they are possible and very, very interesting.

There are also fuse panels, heblinks and all sorts of other little toys and we won’t even bother with all of them. The idea was to see the larger and more relevant components: alternator charging units, battery protection, information, control and parameter modification. It’s important to mention though that they tend to work when in a single brand ecosystem. That is, a dometic inverter or shunt will not talk to a mastervolt brain, for example. Each brand has its own protocols and different connection cables, and are designed to work with products from the same series. In other words, if you want to build a more complex system, it’s good to choose in advance which manufacturer you want to work with and make sure they have all the stuff you want at the power you need.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t forget to share it in your community.

Articolul Auxiliary elements of the electrical system apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

Generically, an inverter will convert current from 12/24 or 48v DC to 230 or 110 for Americans, AC. That is, from what we use in our car or USB sockets to what we use in our home sockets. There are inverters that are also chargers, i.e. they can take 230v from the grid and convert to 12/24/48v to charge the batteries. We’ll talk about those towards the end.

There are a few aspects of inverters to pay attention to: power in W, which includes peak power in w, own consumption, efficiency and pure sine. With all these aspects the producers are quite generous in their interpretation, not to say that they lie directly or lie by omission. And we need to discuss them one by one, to see what they mean, why they are important and how the sellers manipulate them, because it kind of annoys me and is basically a kind of deception. Sorry, it’s not a kind of, it’s outright cheating.

First of all we have the power in W at normal consumption but also at peak These numbers tell us how much the inverter can sustain as constant consumption and maximum consumption, over extremely short periods, i.e. seconds or in generous cases tens of seconds. In general the peak is twice the normal current.

Let’s look at a case study: you go to an online shop and see a 1000w inverter. You know you have a small espresso machine that consumes 850w and, you do a simple calculation like 850 is less than 1000, and you say ready, that’s it for me. Add to cart. The next day, the FAN guy knocks on the door with the package, you unpack it, mount it and want to do the first test. Surprise of the show … the inverter goes into protection and that is instant, knock out in 2 seconds, and you are left with an empty wallet and an empty soul and you wonder what the hell is going on? Few people know that Chinese wats are not the same as European quality ones. They are smaller, much much smaller, about 60-70% of normal. So essentially, the first problem with power is that the watts stated on the box are not those in the inverter. This problem has existed for years with low end inverters. I know because I have a 600w one that was plugged into my Pajero and it squeaks if I put two Macbooks and a cooler in it, although theoretically it should work fine. Chinese inverter from Well that doesn’t do what it promises, case in point with me. Plus case in point with the espresso machine, from a friend. I was actually there when it happened.

But that’s not the worst thing as the watts are a little lower than on the box. People have got used to this samsarella. More recently, however, a completely new thing has appeared in inverters, namely, instead of passing the rated power per description, peak power is passed. So our 2000w inverter actually only knows 2000w for 15 seconds, or what we call peak power, before it goes into protection, as in reality it is a 1000w inverter. That’s not ok at all and I see it as a kind of cheating. I’ve seen it on several large sales sites, it’s not an isolated case. The convention, since time and earth, is to pass rated power, not peak. It’s like me saying I can run 3 minutes a mile like a world champion. But I forget to mention that I can run 3 minutes per kilometre for about 100 metres until I stop in the first bushes and give up the ghost. But I’m coaxing the information to put me in a good light and it’s essentially completely untrue.

The market is starting to get flooded with this kind of stuff and the result, in the short term, will be broken electronic equipment and fried inverters. I’m not defending big sites or marketplaces, because partners post all kinds of stuff. At first it’s the fault of the manufacturers, because it’s misleading information done with good knowledge and then of the importers who want to sell anything after they give it a little polish and say it’s professional or premium or whatever sad marketing words they use in their descriptions. So, you always look at the power rating and … unfortunately … 2000-3000w pure sine inverters at 100 euros only exist in dreams. What you find on websites or, worse, on OLX, often have false specifications that are not true.

The next important criterion for me is pure sinus / modified sinus. As the name implies, a pure sine inverter will deliver a very stable and high quality current, which resembles the graph of the sine function in mathematics. Whereas the modified sinus will look like a series of stairs going up and down. Essentially, the current comes with gallons and is of inferior quality to the modified sinus. It is quite possible that some electric motors will not start at the modified sine, although the inverter power would correspond to their starting. Also some electrical and electronic appliances are sensitive to interference created by the modified sinus. This includes refrigerators and microwaves, but not only.

Also, many battery-operated appliances such as phones, tablets or laptops can have their life shortened or their chargers damaged by the poor quality of current produced by a cheap inverter with a modified sine wave. The reality on the ground is that at least 5 out of 10 inverters that say pure sine are not pure sine, and the manufacturers and sellers know this. But it relies on the fact that no one is demented enough to put the oscilloscope on the inverter to see what the wave actually looks like. Likewise, almost no one makes the connection between how much phones or laptop chargers heat up when sitting in the inverter, an effect that is also caused by the poor quality, gated current that passes through them. So, as with power, and pure sine is often in pen. To have a benchmark, a 1000w pure sine inverter, with 2000w peak and real efficiency over 90%, is not likely to be under 1300-1400 lei except on Black Friday, maybe. At 300-400 lei, we’re getting a relatively power-hungry inverter, most likely with a modified sine, which will noticeably affect the rest of our electronics, but will do so slowly, slowly, arduously, in the long run. So you, as a user, will never make the connection between cause and effect. And, again, this is what manufacturers and sellers rely on: nothing blows up immediately, but degrades over time, and so it becomes hard to argue that it was the inverter at fault. Although physics doesn’t lie much. Oh, and there’s another important point to remember. Apart from very high quality inverters, in general the power will be shared between the outlets in the inverter and will not exceed 1500W per output. Regardless of what manufacturers promise, for sustained consumption (and we’re not talking one-minute tests here) and larger consumers, it’s best to look for an inverter that has terminals not sockets, to which you can build a 230v socket system. I repeat, it depends from case to case, but this is where the generic approach is.

This brings us to a less debated aspect, namely the inverter’s own consumption and efficiency. Here I won’t even bother looking at the versions made on the boat, because if they lied to me on sinus and power, I think we’re all wasting our time on these finesses. Let’s start on the right foot and take three big brands that are market leaders: Mastervolt AC Master 1000, Dometic SinePower 1012 and Victron Phoenix 1200, three quality inverters that come with data sheets you can rely on. At Mastervolt, the standby power consumption is reported to be less than 0.1A and when switched on but without consumers it is less than 1.5A with a 92% efficiency of conversion from 12 to 230v. We add here a total harmonic distortion or THD of 3% and ±0.5 hertz, so super good values for a pure sine quality. As an aside, that pure sine line isn’t perfect either. It has small variations which are called harmonic distortions and the lower the value, the better. We won’t get into the subject as we’re going straight to Narnia, but it was important to know what THD is. Moving on, for the Dometic SinePower 1012 we have 350mA standby consumption, 1 amp on and over 90% efficiency, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how much over 90. It can be 90.5 or 99%. My impression is that it’s over 90 but up to 91, as all marketing calls it. We have a THD of 5% and ±0.5 hertz, so marginally weaker than the Mastervolt in this respect. The latest is the Victron Phoenix 1200 which in the data sheet states an efficiency of 92%, a consumption in zero load of 8w or 0.6A approximately and in standby of 2w or 0.15A approximately. As for the current we have a THD of 2% and the same half hertz variation.

By comparison, all these inverters give an infinitely better current than what you get at home from the grid from Enel, Engie or whoever you have a contract with. I’ve seen the specs, let’s see some indicative prices: the Mastervolt AC Master 1000 is about 2500 RON, the Dometic SinePower 1012 is just over 2000 RON and the Victron Phoenix 1200 is around 2200 RON, of course depending on where you look. Now, seeing these specifications for what we can call 3 units in the top range, let’s ask ourselves… what are the chances that an inverter of a few hundred lei will have 2-3000w Nominal (as it says 6000-7000w on it, it looks like it holds a block staircase), 95% – 96% efficiency, i.e. above Victron, Mastervolt or Dometic and pure sine. But of course, without any data sheet, i.e. we go on trust. Well, we determine that the odds are zero, hold a moment of mourning for sellers and importers and get on with it.

Let’s be clear, I’m not saying that a cheap inverter with a modified sine doesn’t do some work nor that there isn’t pure sine a more affordable idea at the price, but with savings elsewhere, such as build quality, real power or so on. You want to stick a camping light in the socket, a peeler box or a mosquito zapper is Super ok, you do your job with it. But it will have an extremely poor yield and a huge own consumption. Going back to my Chinese inverter bought in 2014, the efficiency measured in the pajero was 68% real, with a 2.1A own consumption without consumers, summer. I mean, for 10 amps consumed, I was getting about half, which is not great. As you’ve seen, electrical systems lose everywhere, from the loss in the solar panel to the batteries, then to the 12-230 conversion, then possibly more loss if you have a laptop that converts 230 to 18-19v or whatever its operating voltage is. And that makes cheap inverters extremely inefficient.

It’s simply burnt out power for nothing, going nowhere but into an inverter fired up with fans on full blast to try to cope. That’s actually the argument I’m trying to make about the quality of an inverter. A good unit helps you enjoy your equipment and power from the offgrid system. A bad one leaves you in the dark quickly and you have the chance of ruining some electronics in your camper. I too used this Well in my Pajero, because I didn’t have room to put anything bigger in it at the time. But I have used it always knowing its disadvantages and the problems that can occur. I mean, other than charging the iphone and very rarely the laptop, he didn’t have much work to do. Oh yes and I used the Peltier box from Campingaz in this episode about camping fridges.

Finally, there’s an inverter-charger like the one we have installed in the Gloria. Ours is called Victron Multiplus 2000, but most of the big manufacturers have a version. At Mastervolt it’s called CombiMaster and at Dometic it’s also called SinePower but has a different product code, of course. Ours retains the same specifications as the Phoenix, with 92% efficiency but 2kw power (nominal, not peak). What makes it different is that it can draw from the grid when you’re out in the field or when you put the car in the yard, and it can charge 2kwh batteries. The Multiplus saved us from needing another device to perform this task, because in terms of speed, nothing compares to this method of charging batteries. In an hour or so it’s a full bank, considering we don’t get below 30% most of the time.

Of course, there are other things to discuss about inverters but I wanted to review the most important things. It came out a longer episode with more hate because it’s probably the most commonly bought product and, naturally, there are most sellers who try to sell inferior stuff and offer misleading specifications. For anyone who wants to dispute what I’m saying, we can always sit down with the product and test it for both efficiency, as we see everything through the Victron SmartShunt in my Sprinter and keep the data on the server for public viewing, and also put it on an oscilloscope so we can see that 3-4-7 kw pure sine at 400 lei. But seriously, it’s easy to relax. I tested a few and the results were more than disappointing.

Now that we’ve cleared up this mystery of good and bad inverters, we’ve completed the part of must have components in the camper. In the next episode we’ll go over nice-to-have components, 5g system communication, miscellaneous monitoring, charging from the alternator and all sorts of little auxiliary units that can make an electrical system better and help you conserve your resources.

Articolul What is and what does an inverter do? apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

In article number 4 of the series, I want to talk about an important component, namely the solar controller, which essentially organizes the energy coming from the panel to put it into the batteries. Without a controller, if you hooked the solar panel directly to the battery it would work a little and then … the battery would make popcorn.

There are two types of controllers: PWM and MPPT. The main difference between them is that PWM or Pulse Width Modulation is essentially a slightly smarter switch – it either draws current or doesn’t draw current to the batteries, using pulses. Once the „switch” is „open”, the battery will pull the panel voltage down and charge. This process stops when the PWM shuts down, hence the name pulse width modulation. And it keeps repeating the process until the battery is full, increasing the break intervals as the battery voltage increases. This type of controller needs a panel with a voltage close to that of the battery to do its job, which is quite important but also a notable limitation. I mean, for a 12 volt system, the panel needs to be up to 20 volts or so, which isn’t great. Clear example: If you take a 100w panel at 20V and put it in a PWM controller, it will still drop to 13V. Mathematically, if we have 100W at 20V, it will result in 5 amp hours. But, because a PWM can’t intervene in the voltage, we have 13v with 5 amp hours so the efficiency drops to 65%, come on 70% in the most optimistic scenario.

If we now look at the other variant, MPPT or Maximum Power Point Tracking, it works completely differently. If PWM connects and disconnects through a panel battery circuit, MPPT has two different circuits. This notably more advanced controller lowers panel voltage and behaves like a smart DC-DC Charger, especially in common 12v systems. Let’s take the whole 100W panel example from earlier to see what happens. In the case of the MPPT, if you input 100W at 20V, so 5 amps, it will drop the voltage and produce almost the same 100W but at 13V so somewhere around 7 amps. I have made these approximations because in any such process there will naturally be some losses. Maybe 2 amps don’t seem like a lot, but they are relevant as a percentage. And when you have 300-500-1000w of panels on your camper, the 30% difference in efficiency is more than relevant. Anyway, you don’t get to put PWM on large systems, because it’s not designed for that, you still go back to MPPT. But, as an idea, PWM is an old technology that doesn’t really make sense anymore except for small and low-budget systems or slow loads over long periods of time (garden lights and the like).

I’ve tried to explain the difference simply, so as not to get too technical, although I still did a bit. The most relevant aspect is that MPPT has about 30% higher efficiency than pwm so, without a doubt, this is the controller we want to choose. But you have to be careful, because many cheap Chinese controllers say MPPT but … usually they are not.

And MPPTs are of many kinds. Personally I use a Victron Smart Solar 100-30, that means it can operate at max 100V and 30Amps. Sure, each manufacturer will describe it differently or have different terminology for their models, but with Victron controllers the first number is maximum voltage and the second is maximum amperage. Smart means it has bluetooth and I can connect to it anytime to see the history, trends and what’s happening in real time. Bonus, thanks to my setup, I can also see the information from the net with the help of Cerbo GX via VRM. I would say this is a simple and effective system. There are alternatives, such as those that draw power from both the solar and the alternator, from Epever, Renogy or C-Tek or Redarc. I admit, I like the idea, it seems like a clean, simple solution that works both as a solar controller and as a DC-DC from the car. But basically, they tend to make me wary of stuff that is all in one, because when it breaks, it breaks everything, obviously. And for safety, I chose to use a Victron Smart BMS CL100 to charge from the alternator and SmartSolar for the panel. That way, if one goes down for whatever reason, you’re left with a possible power source. By no means am I saying they are bad, on the contrary C-Tek and Redarc are excellent manufacturers, especially on the overlanding side. But, I preferred to separate them for my peace of mind.

Another point to touch on here is installation and efficiency. Just like any other product, the controller has an output that can vary according to temperature. If the installation is done in an enclosed space, where there is no room to ventilate, you may be surprised to see either a low output or it stops. Also, not all MPPTs are built the same, hence the price differences. Some have yields of 98% up to temperatures of 40 degrees, others can be below 90% on their best days. It’s an important point because the whole process that energy goes through from when it comes from the sun to when it reaches your iPhone jack involves some losses. And quality equipment ensures you the lowest losses. If we go back to PWM and think that from 70% efficiency we cut about 10% when it’s hot, you better buy a dynamo and put in an hour of cardio, you get better results.

Besides the controller, you need cables, connectors, fuses and all sorts of things and I would like to talk briefly about them because they are important. First of all cables and connectors, because I remembered a discussion on a group of RVers where someone argued that the specific ones for solar are expensive. It may be, but dedicated cables have, besides another quality, increased UV resistance, which is a very important aspect. Normal cables can bake after two to three summers and the results can range from failure to short circuit or fire. So whatever you mount at home, do it with dedicated products. Also related to the cable there is an aspect of fitting that I have encountered more in the states and less in Europe. On many systems I’ve seen an automatic fuse placed on the route between the panel and the controller. The utility I see is to cut the power to the panel when you want to remove the batteries, as you basically have to remove the panel first and then the batteries. Otherwise, without a battery connected, you have a chance that the energy in the panel will make a popcorn controller. Whether you want to unplug the system to turn off the panel or protect against possible surge problems, a fuse here doesn’t hurt. Maxim never uses it, but it doesn’t hurt.

Well, looks like we’ve solved the mystery of the solar controllers. So, in this series, so far we’ve talked about how to build and size an offgrid camper system, what batteries exist and what we should buy, what solar panels and controllers to choose. I think it’s worth talking a bit about the 12v-230v inverter because we found a lot of myths and misconceptions out there and it’s good to know exactly what we’re looking for when we spend our money on a product like this. Because 2000w from a no name inverter made in a pile in a village in China is not quite the same 2000w from a Renogy, Victron or MasterVolt.

Articolul All about the solar controller apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

The most frequently asked question on camper or caravan groups goes something like this: „If I put in an x watt panel and a y amp battery, will that be enough for a weekend?”

And I come and ask… enough to what? Do you want to keep two phones charged and a light or do you want to charge electric bikes, watch TV and sweat? Any offgrid or offcamping system must be thought from the consumers and time of use, never from the resources.

The calculation is not difficult, but there are a few things to consider: how much does each appliance consume? Basically it says on them, most of them are 12V, but you will have the consumption expressed in amps or watt hours. So, if the fridge says 3 amps, multiply 3 amps by 12 volts to find out how many watts it consumes, i.e. 36wh. That is, for 24-hour operation, you get 24 hours times 36wh, 864wh per day. So to keep a fridge going for 2 weekend days, you need 1.7kwh of energy or just over 140 amp hours.

Clearly, not all equipment works consistently. If you have an LED strip that is only used for 4 hours at night and consumes 1 amp hour, or 12 wh, that’s 4 hours times 1 amp times 2 days times 12 volts, 96wh or 8 amp hours, depending on how you want to put it. But, as a rule, you have to take them all and make a realistic calculation and in no case an optimistic one, in the „let me not consume so much” way. You usually consume, and sometimes even more, and there’s nothing worse than running out of power on holiday.

Now, you’ve approximated for fridge, lights, blender, inverter, TV, phones, water pump and everything else around the camper and you’ll use and let’s assume for ease that we got 2500w consumed in 2 days, hypothetically. Moving on to the next step, let’s see where we get the power from and how we put it back. I’ll do another episode on the different types of batteries and the differences between them, but for this case, let’s assume we’re working with a cheap gel battery variant, the cheapest possible. Gel batteries can be discharged up to 50% of their capacity, so if you have a 100Ah or 1280wh battery, you can actually discharge half of it so you have 50Ah usable or 640wh. If you go over once it’s not really a drama, but repeated discharges below this percentage will lead to premature battery damage. So, if I want to have power for the whole weekend, I would need about 400Ah or 5120wh from which to draw constant power. But there is also the aspect of reloading.

And this is where the panel comes in. There’s a lot to talk about panels and I’ll discuss that part separately but, to keep things simple, we’ll take a standard 300w farm panel as a reference. With an average of 3-6 hours of actual production, in my experience this panel charges somewhere between 1000 and 1500wh in a day. Sure, it can vary if there are clouds, if it’s too hot, if the panel is clear or at a favorable angle. But if we were to take an annual average, I’d say 1280wh, for easy math. So, on a good day, a 300w panel can produce enough to compensate for what you consume. In the cheapest version then, for a super basic weekend setup, you would need a 300w panel, 2 batteries of 100Ah or 1280wh each, so you get close to 50% consumption and a MPPT solar controller.

The example is rudimentary to present the calculation method. In principle, in a better system you will also have bluetooth control for example, to see what you consume, how much you charge and approximately how many hours your system can run in its current mode. As we’ve been talking about, in our Sprinter 4×4 we have 320Ah lithium from Victron, a Smart Solar 100/30 with bluetooth and a single 300w panel. In general, if we keep it clean, it will provide us with power without much drama throughout the summer. Of course, this is where the lithium battery bank and the rest of the components come in, but that’s a story for another episode.

So let’s recap how we think about a system for a caravan or motorhome: Step 1, we see what consumers we have. Step 2, we estimate how long these consumers stay on. Step 3, we calculate about how much a battery bank should be to hold our system without charging. Step 4, we see how many solar panels and what kind we can put to compensate for consumption. Step 5, we put everything on paper and see what results. Finally, let me give you the most common option that works for a good part of the cases: a 300w panel or larger if you can find it, a correctly sized MPPT such as a Victron Smart Solar 100/30 and a 220Ah gel battery, also from Victron Energy. This was my first sprinter setup and I did very ok with it 2 summers.

In future articles we will talk about types of panels and types of batteries. There is a lot to tell so each one will have its own dedicated article. So if you want to be as clear as possible how to build a PV camper system and what is worth investing in when it comes to components, follow the blog and sign up for the newsletter.

Articolul How do you size a photovoltaic system? apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.

If you want to stay offgrid, somehow you have to have power from somewhere that you can consume. Whether you want a light to read by, an outlet for your laptop or to charge your phone, that power has to come from somewhere. And in this article I want to see where the energy comes from, how it is stored and how it is consumed from different types of batteries. Let’s review them in the first phase and see what we really end up with:

We have the normal lead acid car batteries, then we have deep cycle gel, we put lithium-ion in the list although meh and lithium iron polymer or lifepo4. The lead-acid battery is designed for traction, i.e. to give you power to start the car. It is not designed for constant consumption and will deteriorate quickly. We also get rid of Lithium-ion because they are not really common and they are quite dangerous, sometimes having quite interesting and violent exothermic reactions. We’re sticking with deep cycle and lifepo4, which we’ll call lithium from now on for ease.

We will compare the batteries according to several criteria: purchase price, weight, lifetime, number of cycles and DoD or depth of discharge, total production. Sure, we can go into much more detail but we said let’s just focus on the most important stuff. I would make a mention here that we are talking about standard lithium batteries and not aftermarket balancing cell variants or DIY solutions. Sure, they can be done, but it’s a hassle and 3 out of 5 people I know who have had them done have problems with them. So, to keep the balance, we take 2 batteries from the same manufacturer and compare them.

We will choose a Victron AGM 100Ah and a Victron LiFePO4 100Ah also, that is 1280Wh or 1,28kWh. Of course, the first thing we notice is the very, very different acquisition cost. On Darcom Energy’s website, the AGM version is 1800 RON and the lithium version 7100 RON and from there things separate quickly. The next easily intuited difference has to do with weight, and I find that to be an extremely important aspect of a camper. In the case of the 100Ah variant, the lithium is less than half the weight of the AGM. As capacities increase, the difference becomes 1 in 3 or even 1 in 4, as deep cycle batteries are usually quite heavy. We will come back to the question of weight in relation to Depth of Discharge, because it is a very important issue. So we’ve established so far that lithium is lighter and more expensive. We call these elementary empirical observations.

Moving on, we come to life as number of cycles, which is influenced by this Depth of Discharge. A deep cycle battery has an optimum DoD of 50%. This means that out of 100Ah in our standard battery, we can use 50Ah before it starts to degrade quite seriously. In the data sheet on Victron’s website, they inform us that at 50% discharge we have 600 battery cycles. Good. So in the life of this battery, we can use 600 times each 50Ah. To keep a balance, we still stay at 50% DoD and look at the lithium data sheet. For the same specifications, in the 2022 version of the batteries, with a similar DoD, the same battery supports 5000 charge cycles, so 8.3 times more cycles. But this is not the most relevant feature of these batteries, or lithium in general, but the fact that they support a DoD of 80%, where they have 2500 cycles. So unlike a deep cycle where you can draw 50Ah from a 100Ah battery, here you can draw 80Ah from a battery of the same capacity. The normal lifespan of a gel battery is 5-7 years, whereas the lifespan of a lithium battery is 15-20 years, so add that to the list of notable differences.

And here we come back to weight, because we originally calculated the weight at purchase, which defines how much you pay FAN Courier to get your battery home. But now, with the new data, we calculate according to available energy. If we can get 80Ah out of the lithium battery and it weighs 15 kg, to get the same energy out of the gel we need a 160Ah battery weighing 47 kg. And lo and behold, I added a black ball to the gel, or white to the lithium, or whatever you want to call it.

With all this information, we go back to costs and there are two important aspects: the price per kWh at purchase and the price per kWh over the lifetime of the battery. Clearly, gel wins hands down at 1400 RON per kWh while lithium jumps to 5500 RON per kWh. Let’s go back a bit to the number of cycles and DoD to calculate the lifetime price per kWh. We take strict DoD 50%, and for gel we will have 50Ah i.e. 0,6kWh x 600 cycles so 360kWh over the lifetime. For lithium we have 50Ah, so the same 0.6kWh x 5000 cycles so 3000kWh over the lifetime of our battery. We divide by the purchase price and the result is that gel costs 5 lei per kWh and lithium 2.36 lei per kWh, so less than half.

To recap: cost of acquisition, 1-0 to gel. weight 1-1, recover lithium, DoD 2-1 for lithium. 3-1 life cycles for lithium. Price per kWh purchase, point for gel, so 3-2. Finally, price per kWh per operating period, 4-2 for lithium. And then there was the difference in lifespan from … let’s say 7 years on gel, as I’m feeling generous, and 15-20 years on lithium. So 5-2 and the match is over. I agree that this option has a higher purchase price, but together we have shown that you actually come out better on every relevant score. For a long time I’ve been trying to get these calculations down on paper. I’m sure I misspoke here and there, I said watts instead of watts hour or whatever. I’m sure we’ll find out together where we went wrong from the comments. But I really wanted to cover this topic in more detail because, more than anything else, the batteries in the gloria the sprinter sparked the classic reaction: They’re expensive, ladies. So, overall, I can say with certainty that no, they are not at all expensive compared to some gel batteries. And I haven’t gotten into the details of how it loads and unloads yet, there’s another fantastic drama I want to discuss in a future episode, notably geekier than this one. But these batteries are the definition of „I’m too poor to buy cheap stuff.”

Now that we’ve talked about how you size a system and what batteries you put in, in the next blog we’ll talk about solar panels and the controllers that … well … control them. And there we have to split the difference and it is as important as the batteries. I hope you enjoyed the text and I hope to read you soon!

Articolul About Camper batteries apare prima dată în CamperVan Fest Romania.