hey guys it's Kat from the motorhome travel website Wandering Bird. Today I'm going
to answer some questions I've been getting about off-grid power especially
when wild camping and to do that I brought along the expert in all things
technical in our van Mr. WB. Good morning hello wherever you are whatever
you're doing hi we're going to get into all that very quickly thank you for all
of you who've been putting in your questions before we get started
answering that if you'd like to see more videos about technical aspects of
motorhome travel the dog is like how do I get into the camera shop if you want
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the fun stuff as it happens so if the cameras moving a certain dog is jumping
around like a crazy idiot right let's get into off-grid power how it works so
I'm gonna go back to the very very very beginning basics because I don't really
understand a lot about power anyway which requires the expert so I'll
explain it to you in very easy terms to start off with you basically have two
ways of getting power inside your motor home you've got the 240 volts so when
you're plugged in using your little lead technical term oh thank you I said lead
I do get power so if you're plugged into a campsite or at home and you're your
fan is connected to an external power source you're gonna have 240 volts so
you can use normal plugs like you at home and you can use things like
electric kettles and hair dryers and microwaves and all of this stuff we'll
get to generator the little bit but you can also get 240 volts or agender if
your van is not connected with a power lead to an external power source you do
not have 240 volts which means you can't use your normal plugs he's gonna
interrupt me we're we're talking very basic and we're gonna get to the unless
okay so normally you're only running off your battery which is 12 volts so your
normal UK 3 pin plugs will not work there is an unless we're gonna work
after that so doing that you're off grid and therefore
you're not going to be plugged into anything you can only use your 12 volt
socket which are normally and a little round cigarette lighter II type things
that give you power so if you have I'm gonna let I'm gonna let him loose in a
minute let me just work these steps in my head I'm brace okay your grace good
if you have an electric kettle the only works of a 3-pin normal UK plug it's not
gonna work if you're not on proper electrical pipe main - I think you that
was what I wanted which means a gas cattle is a really good idea by the way
just as an aside it also means your very expensive lovely posh hairdryer won't
work and no I have not found a decent well bought a dry yet although I've
tried many that's alright so that is the first thing to understand no matter how
many batteries you put in your van or solar panels or anything else you're not
gonna be able to use your three pin 240 volt plugs if you're not plugged in okay
let's get to the bucks how do we get power whilst we're not plugged him
I'm just glad something about your 12 volt hairdryer because we have used a
lot and whilst I remember most about hair dryers are six or ten on their
ridiculously power-hungry if your brain exploding right now just bear with it
I'm going to explain that in a minute basically they use a lot of power which
means that the 12-volt sockets in the back of the van that you normally get
around the lutely habitation area actually your blood the fuses if you use
them they will only work on the big heavy-duty cigar cigarette lighter
socket in the front cab which means normally you've got all of your engine
running to use them so how do you know is there a way so we've got a cigarette
sockets at the back of the van and at the front in the cab we have how do we
know which one I could plug a 12-volt hydride on these at the back they all
say three amp or six am what I've what the ones at the back I've wired in
because the van didn't have enough we're gonna get the ones I've wired in we
wired it six the van had one 601 three amperes
standard so we had to put extra but your 12-volt
the the the only one that was vaguely kind of ok-ish is 10m so not only do you
have to look to make sure that it's a 12 volt hairdryer or appliance cause
supplies too many things you also then have to look at the amp it when you buy
it yes you do just pay somewhere where you plug it on into the problem you've
got you don't really have much choice to get to generate heat it needs power and
forget power yeah but this also applies to all sorts of things like what sort of
amp is an electric toothbrush Oh ash a minuscule yeah you should still check
the ambition better light which is what results doing you're not running the
electric toothbrush you're recharging the battery it's it's phone yes
so not all phones and things are fine on pretty much all cigarette some simple
things i phone 5 6 & 7 s1 I'm charging which means that your little 12 volt
charger sockets you can buy the they know only have two plugs in there one on
each they're fine what a lot of people do they'll buy
these 12 volt cigarette charger sockets I said what it doesn't work on my iPod
that's because your iPod needs to teach you 3 amps to charge yes we had and
iPhone tends need 2 hours to charge 2.1 amps you got to be careful if you've got
a 3 amps red light socket and you put a 3-way 12 12 volt charger in there and
you put your phone or two phones and an ipad in and you've got why phone 6 or
107 and iphone 10 and a reasonable-sized ipod so the 12 inch iPad um so I'm going
to rephrase that if you have a 3 amp socket and you've
put a multi-way charging thing you see you've got all these different leads
coming out you've got 2 amps on an iPad 2 amps on iPhone X did you say and 2
amps on something else that's 6 amps even if you just had two of them in
that's 4 amps which is more than the 3 amps
okay that makes sense that makes a good thing is if
correctly you should only blow the fuse and they're normally faithful and can
you just take out the appropriate fuse in the room and you can't put what
happens when when you see motor homes or cars in in flames at the side of the
road because people say oh well what I'll do is I'll change that five hunters
and I'll put a 10 amp fuse in and it works great for 20 minutes whilst the
wiring is getting hotter besides wiring I think that's cool so
we're good on 12 volts think and the 12 volts come from your battery which leads
me to the whole other question that I got us I'll roll all into one you will
generally have at least two batteries on your motor home you're gonna have the
engine battery and you're gonna have a leisure battery some bands have to later
batteries but most standard just have one when you are going going when we're
going most of the power of the van even the
12-volt sockets on the front when you're charging is coming from the engine
battery am i right yes it's coming from the engine might spring the alternator
cool so the leisure battery isn't doing
hardly anything when we're driving when the engine is running
so the okay gonna explain that well why is your battery normally is charging
whilst the engines running the alternator in the car which is like the
cars version of a dynamo it generates electricity based on the car the engine
and that recharges your and you must Elisha battery and it will run certain
items or run lights when the engine is running the laser battery is literally
just being recharged normally yes unless and there's a couple of unless is on
this one so we have the trimmer heating system that allows you to use the
heating while you're driving and it uses the leisure battery for the heating and
then we have certain sockets we drive a long way with a live drive with that on
the end of the leash battery won't actually get that charge to Allah it
will depends on how cold it is an hour higher we've got it but but there's only
so much it they normally charge anything you know from four arms to 25 amps so if
you think about it if your heating systems taking 10 hours and it's night
and your windscreen wipers wrong and you got you've got front heating on you've
got a 75 amp alternator your lights might be taking five amps your heating
might be taking ten on your back eating is taking 10 amps at some point you end
up with only a couple of hours left to charge the batteries yeah so is that how
it works so what the vehicle needs comes out of that 75 amps for example and then
whatever the left goes into recharging the batteries essentially yes so if you
if you you know you've seen me do it many times if we've run the battery low
already to charge it I'll turn the lights off for driving during the day
they all run off police but they also drain two things fuel consumption and
focus mainly on power for today so the next question then came from what
happened if you're not going to be driving so we tend to do a lot of
driving which we've always said if we do one day stopped then the next day we'll
charge the batteries how long do you reckon from a day at rest so we haven't
been driving but we've been using a lot of things in the battery is fair even
wonder how do you know if the batteries to run down oh we have a monitor so we
can see it and yeah and the monitor is an intelligent message management system
and what it does is it stops us from using the battery if it gets too long if
you deplete your battery below 50% now you've broken your battery
completely I can mean you want getting it to come back from that and be
acceptable is very good is that standard for all batteries or just a specific
making back to let acid making now to be fair the Elijah battery actually is I
think we've got an AGM battery which is dry buffering some very new technologies
of getting 2 buffers Technologies separately because you've got also got
with you - oh yeah yeah yeah and and the cost varies as well yeah we can see the
laser battery yeah good now that thirteen point O is what we're
getting that's the bulbs charging quite well if
we yeah so we can see the amps that are kicking in there's no one who's being
taken from it yeah that's because it's fully charged okay normally that would
tell us how many amps we go we see the voltage that is charging yeah yep and
that's how you see what we're getting from yeah when we're not plugged in and
we using stuff can it show what we're draining yes okay so that um there if
it's in the positive side it's topping up the battery and negative side it's
what we're taking now - Jamie so we can see we're charging it see how
it's fluctuating all the time yeah it's just you can see we're getting one arm
point - so it's it's shifting around on average we'll probably get three or four
amps or now we've got it to solar - vehicle
what's the 14.5 it was just on that's what's feeding to the engine but we're
topping up both the ledger battery and the engine must
so the ledger bathrooms are 13 something and vehicle batteries are 14.5 only
because we've got power going into it so a 12-volt battery should sit at twelve
point one volts okay if you start getting below twelve point one so cut
them exactly what we were talking about so essentially if you got a 75 amp
alternator on your car or on your motor I'm sorry and you have a hundred amp
battery let's make the figures easy unless your battery you deplete that so
you you're at the fifty percent point you take you to the bare minimum when
you get to the fifth spent point your system or your batting on to or beep and
say hours it does it depends on me you just wanted it direct it won't so at
that point your 50 amps down I'm using basic we're kind of assuming that anyone
who understands this probably isn't watching the video and that it's people
like me who don't really understand this who are watching this and we want to use
basic six terms you've got 50 amps life yes but you need to replenish yes he's
got a 75 amp alternator yes ultimate 75 power that uses everything so recharge
joined your muttering also allocates about 25 amps to recharge your ledger
battery so technically two hours it should be you will say 25 amps on yes
the reality is you're charging phones we do another so the basic rule of thumb is
that can you deplete it to 50% in a day it depends what you're using so if
you're generally in our life how long does it most phones owns we can get two
days of solid usage yeah without depleting it we can actually get three
days but that's on the basis we don't have like tsundere all I likes are LED
so they're very low yeah we use one amp if we've got everything we've changed a
lot of systems or changed a lot of made sure that the setup we've got is to be
as economical on this as possible so we did in our previous song we have
two big ledger buffers yes a big engine but yeah in this one we've only got one
we've not needed a second one that was a question I asked so let's just just
continue this through so let's say it's taking us two days to go down to 50% and
the system is now saying you're at your limit
you've got to charge your battery so we drive so you're looking at probably at
least a three or four hour drive so yeah we generally try and do three you can't
just start the engine and let it run for four hours you can potentially destroy
your engine yeah they're designed to run like that for 20 minutes top 30 minutes
you know but engines are not designed to sit there hey it'll overheat be it's
just bad it'll clog up it you say it's coking up essentially it's not getting
enough through the engine so this is where people start saying well we'll put
a second battery them because if they use one and that's taken two or three
days then they've got a second battery lose your battery that they can then
spend another two or three days of beating before they have to top them
both up and we fire because we tend to travel and wild can't we don't stop in
one place for days on end the other side of that is we try and make it so if we
are stationary for 24 hours the next day we drive for at least two hours and then
also every three or four days we tend to use a campsite anyway so we can use
facilities and you waste all the stuff and then give everything a really good
charge because we tend to not leave our van and go exploring when we while
camping so we'll find a campsite so we might as well plug in and charge
everything up then anyway hey guys I had to stop the video there and cut it into
two parts because the Internet where we're at in raw France is just atrocious
and I cannot upload really long videos at the moment so
there's about another 20 25 minutes where we talk about solar panels and
generators and inverters and how we've used all of those in our motorhomes to
give us power whilst we're off-grid now this was a question that came up in our
membership group where we answer questions and we chat live on Zoom
to all the people who are in there I'm going to put the second part of the
video up imminently so the people who are in our group can see it first if you
want to be in the group I want to see it you can join in the linkers and notes
below if not part 2 of this video will be out in a few weeks time in the
meantime things that are coming up on the channel it's my birthday in a week
in a bit and a couple of companies have offered some prizes to give away it's
just a bit of a fun thing for people who are on our email list so if you
currently get emails from me awesome you'll get an email very soon
about the giveaways that are coming up if you're not on our email list and
you'd like to be involved there's a link in the video notes by all means click
that I can send you a free road trip planner you'll get checklists those
guides there's tips there's all sorts of things about motorhome travel in the UK
and Europe and once you're on the list you'll be emailed and telling you how to
get involved in the prizes and the giveaways that we've got just as a quick
wedding of your appetite we've got lifesaver giving away one of that
amazing jerrycans that filters the water out there fantastic
so they've offered to give one of those away to one lucky winner we've also got
a sticker map one of the ones that showed the UK and Europe so you can put
the stickers of the countries that you've been to it don't have a lot of
you ask where to get from and they're like gold dust at the moment so I've got
one of them to give away and I've got a couple of other prizes and things that
I'm going to keep up my sleeve for the moment but by all means join our mailing
list and you will be notified about how to get involved so those are the two
quick things I wanted to talk to you about one was our membership and the
other one was the email list and I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it
useful as I say part 2 will be out in a few weeks but you can't see it quicker
if you choose to I hope you're all safe and well and I will see you very soon
take care bye bye
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