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Powering your Outdoors Lifestyle

Powering your Outdoors Lifestyle

Preparedness is what divides adventure from misadventure. No matter what kind of fun you like to have outside, powering your lifestyle should be simple.

Know Thyself

The first step in working out the perfect solution for your outdoors lifestyle is a little self-reflection. Where do you want to go? How long do you want to stay there? What are you doing there? Working out your ideal battery capacity doesn’t need to be rocket science. Just work out what’s going to be plugged in and for how long.

Say you have a 60 litre fridge/freezer. Assuming everything is running at capacity, you might be drawing 4 amps total for your fridge. That’s 4 amps per hour. So if you want to remain off grid for two days, you’ll need 4Ah x 48 hours = 192 Ah.

Basically, rinse this process and repeat depending on your setup, and think of this as your ‘raw requirements’, or what you’ll need your battery, and whatever is filling that battery back up, to be able to handle.

Heart and Soul

At the heart of every 12V solution is a battery, or bank of batteries. From the humble cranking lead acid battery that starts your car or boat to the latest space age lithium technology, all batteries do the same thing: store energy for delivery on demand.

But all batteries are not created equal.

Cranking batteries are designed to provide a quick, high amperage jolt to starter motors, and little else. And many modern vehicle alternators are fine tuned to charge starter batteries and then ramp down the voltage they produce, or disconnect altogether, to improve fuel efficiency.

AGM, or absorbed glass mat, batteries are still lead acid, but their design means they’re much better deep cycle batteries. Their depth of discharge (DOD), or how much of the total capacity you can use without breaking them, is around 80%, compared to 50% for a standard lead acid, and they can cycle down repeatedly with less ill effects.

Lithium batteries, and we’re talking about LiFEPo4 here (lithium iron phosphate), are in many ways superior to AGM batteries, but not for every application. Lighter, more expensive up front but cheaper over the long run, they offer close to 100% DOD and much higher cycle numbers than lead acid batteries can deliver. But like everything in life, there's a trade off. By running your lithium battery to 90% DOD you can expect about 2000 cycles over its lifetime before getting your cell pack replaced. reducing you DOD to 50% you can expect up to 5000 cycles. Setting your maximum DOD is easy with the Litrek App.

No Free Lunch

No matter which battery technology you’re using, you need a way to charge those batteries. Pretty much every mobile application offers either an alternator or generator, usually designed just to keep the starter battery going. That’s usually not enough for serious adventurers. And this is where we come back to our figure for keeping our fridges running. If they’re drawing 4Ah, that’s 96Ah/ day. Assuming we have a 140Ah battery with 120 - 130ah available, it’s going to be dead long before we finish our weekend away.

If we just want to run our fridge\s above, and we don’t want to use our engine at all, then we need a solution that’s going to put in as much power as we’re spending per day. Solar panels and generators are two of the most popular ways to keep your auxiliary batteries topped up without running your engine all the time.

The amount of power we can get back into our battery will define how long we can keep this little adventure going. If it’s zero, we have one night of cold food before we need to either go for a long drive or give up and switch to ice.

If we can get 96Ah/ day into our battery, we can stay on the road forever (with some room to charge electronics and power campsite lighting. That would require:

at least 300W of quality solar panels and perfect sunny conditions for around four hours a day.
Running a generator with a trickle charger for around 3.5 hours.
Driving for around 2-3 hours/ day.

But we don’t need to get all of our juice from one place, and we don’t need infinite power. If we halve our usable solar and rely on that alone, we’ll still get about 30 hours before it’s back to the humble eski. Combine that with driving a couple of hours every couple of days and you’re getting pretty close to self-sufficiency with a system as small as 140Ah with 300W of solar panels.

Thankfully, there’s easier ways to keep track of your battery state of charge while you’re out bush, so you can leave your calculator and your worries at home.

Lifestyle

At the end of the day, which battery technology you use and how you keep everything charged up is a very individual journey, but what matters is keeping everything as simple as possible and having real adventures!

Here are three builds for three kinds of adventurer, to give you a glimpse into how each has solved their own problems. Each build is designed to provide enough power, with room to spare.

-The Weekend Warrior-

Running a single 60 litre fridge pulling around 4Ah (96Ah/ day), this build relies on a single auxiliary 140Ah lithium battery, charged by the vehicle’s alternator through a DC-DC charger and isolated from the starter battery. With the AGM we can use between 60-70% of that capacity.

It should be able to comfortably run the fridge for 30 hours: plenty of time to keep the beer cold for weekend escapes.

-The Ultimate Holidayer-

This family caravan has a large fridge/ freezer, house lights, water pumps and a 1000W inverter for charging up laptops, toys for the kids and cameras.

The daily needs tend to average out around 336Ah with the inverter running most of the time. It has twin 140Ah LiFePO4 lithium batteries on board, of which we can use 90% This caravan’s secret weapon is four solar panels on the roof, adding up to around 600W of solar power, which should conservatively provide between 20-30Ah at peak times, or roughly 125-150Ah a day.

Every couple of days, the caravan will either be plugged into mains or into a portable generator for a few hours to top up the lithiums.

-The Off Grid Survivalist-

This 4WD and caravan package is built to go offgrid and stay there. The vehicle has a starter battery and 120Ah AGM under the bonnet, as well as a 140Ah lithium battery in the back to run a single onboard fridge. The caravan has 420Ah of lithium batteries onboard to power the onboard fridge/ freezer and second fridge, as well as the air conditioner for a few hours each evening, lights, inverter, etc. We have 1200W of solar on the roof pushing 300Ah a day into those lithiums, a 3000W generator to fill any gaps and do any heavy lifting like starting up the roof air conditioner.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Whether you fall into the above categories, either side or in between, LiTrek can provide you,\ with the solution you need to power your next adventure. If you need any help determining your power requirements, get in touch with us, check our other blogs and FAQS or ask the LiTrek community!

Happy Travels!