One of the issues of living on the road is that you need to make sure that a reliable infrastructure that allows you to work is in place, and this reliability there are 2 main components:
- Have the right equipments
- Planning
In this article we will talk about the main element that allows the “Office” to operates that is energy.
RV’s by design have a connection for an external AC power supply (regular 220v) that will then supply the house, but when living on the road this is not always available, because you might end-up in a remote place and also because this is paid service and prices can vary from 4€ to 30€, a month paying for that can bring a significant price.
There is only one solution for this problem that is you must be able to produce and stock your energy. Luckily clean energy is a trend now, and there are plenty of solutions available in the market.
Original Setup
Our first battery setup was pretty simple but with a low autonomy (1 day and a half without sun or any external power supply) and was made like that:
In this setup, there were many weak points:
- The main way to charge the battery was via solar panels
- Lead-Acid batteries performance is poor
- Inverter was not good
Even with all the limitations we managed to live 1 year with that, without losing a day of work due to lack of energy.
The upgrade:
With the new setup the battery will charge when the car is moving so when we arrive in a place, most likely the battery will be full. The new battery is LiFePO4 and we expect to have something around 4 days of autonomy which is what we need, every 4 days we will move and then charge the batteries, plus we still can charge with solar energy and AC power.
The new inverter is pure sine wave and will manage itself automatically in order to not spend battery when nothing is on. In addition we have added a remote control allowing us to turn it on of off with Alexa or Google Assistent.
All components in the system are now Victron Energy and can be remote monitored via bluetooth or by internet.
Our only doubt is about the battery’s quality (Power Queen), let’s see how it goes.
