Thursday, September 10, 2015

September 10, 2015 at 02:18PM by advodna_dave


Moved just a few kilomiles up the road to be closer to the Banff village for a couple days (laundry, a restaurant burger and fries and summer gear sales!). We also needed to get out of the trees for a few days since, after not using it since the weekend we bought it four months ago, our little 1000W generator has been having a hard time keeping up with the overcast and chill. Lemme 'splain. First, we've been getting practically zero solar and second, our power usage has spiked since cold nights have been requiring more furnace and rainy days have meant more days inside with the heat on. Instead of our usual 50-60 amp hours per day, we're probably up around 75 at least. Now, most campsites have generator hours from 9-10:30 am and 5-7 pm, 3.5 hrs total. Our 1000W Yamaha generator puts out something like 8 amps of AC power. The way the guy at Magnum, the maker of our 50 amp charge controller, explained it to me our unit takes about 8 amps AC and converts it to 50 amps DC. But, we've been finding that with any other loads (particularly the "hungry" ones like the fridge on AC, the furnace, the bathroom fan etc), the generator quickly overloads and shuts down. In fact, we've had to adjust the "Max Charge Rate" setting on the controller down to 40% or so to keep draw to about 20 amps DC. 20 amps for 3.5 hours, should get us 70 hrs, close to what we need daily, but considering we'd started down about -100 hrs and aren't always home during generator hours, it's been a losing battle. An argument for a 2000W, perhaps, but it won't fit in the roof top box and in reality, the little guy has done its job pretty well considering the conditions. #airstream #myrivetedlife #airstreamwithkids #banff #banffnationalpark #tunnelmountain