First some back story. You can skip to the What I’m doing now part if you want.
We got the Snomaster in the spring and used it on a few weekend trips with no problem. Our setup was fridge in the Jeep and the battery was in the tongue box of our teardrop camper. It was a new VMAX 125AH AGM battery. I also had a CTEC dc to dc charger that ran off the Jeep. The fridge would be plugged in the Jeep while driving and when we get to camp switch to the teardrop battery. Like first few trips no problem. Then I noticed the battery was getting to lower voltages on the same trips. Also the battery wasn’t charging like it was. Normally we would drive to the campsite and when we would get there the battery would be 100%, same on the drive home. We did a few weekend trips where we left on Friday night and stayed in the same site the whole weekend. This shouldn’t have been a problem, we should have been able to go two day on that battery. But by Saturday night I had to run the Jeep to get some charge and in the morning we were in the 40% range of the battery. Way lower than I want to run the battery. We had a two hour drive home and the battery only got up to the 65-70% range. The next weekend I did a test at home, ran the fridge off the battery to see how long it would go. The fridge and freezer were filled with water bottles and pre cooled on AC to start cold. The results were dismal. By early morning I was plugging in the AC battery charger. Now this was being done in the middle of July in Phoenix. It was hot, my garage where the fridge was the coolest it gets in there in the summer is high 95+ that is early in the morning. I just figured it was too hot and the fridge was just running to much. So this meant I was going to need to add solar to supplement the CTEC, the CTEC also has a solar controller built in. I picked up a 100 watt Renogy panel. And we headed out for a weekend trip to test it out before a planned trip to the North Rim. It worked great but we had full sun in the campsites we stayed at. We decided to get another 100 watt panel for the GC trip. That is where the photo above is from. I thought we had it all figured out. A few weeks later we did a weekend trip up north to beat the heat. The battery was at 70% when we headed out but I thought no problem it will be att 100% by the time we get to camp. Nope! Only 75% with a two and a half hour drive. What the #*&/? I get out the voltmeter and am not getting any power to the trailer. Ends up the wire was hitting the muffler and melted the insulation and shorted out. Okay easy fix and 75% will get us through the night. Wake up and we are at 11.Something volts. I have no clue what is going on now. I put the two panels on fid some good sun through the pine trees and see it starting to charge. We left the panels out and let neighbor at the campsite said he would keep an eye on them. We went out exploring looking for some nice dispersed camp sites. 3.5 hours later we we get back and we were at about 40% same as it was when we left. So we decided to head home. That week I called Renogy, CTEC (unless never talked to anyone and didn’t return my calls) and VMAX. VMAX was the most helpful even with the CTEC.
So I had a few things working against me, first because the battery was in the black tongue box we think there was a heat problem. I started check the temps and it would be in the 120’s but still in specks for the battery and CTEC. The reason the battery wasn’t charging like it did in the beginning was because there is a temperature probe on the CTEC it would detect high battery temps and slow the charging. And probably the biggest problem was the battery was defective. It was dying a slow death. $40 and a few weeks later i got a warranty replacement. So I wasn’t going to risk damaging the new battery the same way, so I decided to move the battery and CTEC to the inside conditioned air space inside the jeep. Then the battery would be stored in the house during summer.
Here come the biggest mistake in my teardrop trailer build. I’m mad and in embarrassed that this happened and it was a costly mistake. I was removing the CTEC from the trailer and pulling some wires and some how shorted the CTEC. Dumb mistake not having pulled some fuses before hand. If your keeping track that’s another $260ish. We had a 10 day trip coming up and didn’t have time to order another dc to dc charger and the replacement battery wasn’t in yet. So we pushed back the trip 3 weeks.
What I’m going now.
This is what I have now, I put it together quick because we only had a few weeks before our trip to Colorado.
I built this box to hold the battery and it also has drawers, i now have a Redarc dc to dc charger. (Black box on the right) I should have gone with this one from the start. It will work with lithium batteries and it has a short protection built into it. Also a solar controller. Next to that a fuse box, the two zip wires have power pole connectors, the long one for the fridge the shorter one is an extra. Two usb chargers and a meter. I have a panel that covers the battery.
I haven’t finished build the drawers yet I wanted to see how it worked on our trip. The drawer unit replaced 2 plastic tote that held our camp gear and the off-road tote that had compressor hose and tools. Plus we have room to keep extra dry food that doesn’t fit in the teardrop. There is a power wire that feeds into the bottom drawer where the compressor is so I don’t have to remove it to air up. Works good.
We have only used this setup on on a week trip to Colorado and it work awesome. Now temps were much lower than what I have been dealing with, but the voltage never went below 12.70 volts that I saw. I never needed to get out the solar.
The only thing I would do different would be a lithium battery over the AGM. Maybe when I need to replace the battery lithium will be cheaper. Now this is a spendy setup and I say it that I’m A cheapskate. But some things are worth the money. I’m real happy with this setup now.
I hope all this will help someone out and save some headaches and some money
Todd
