How not to use public transport. Now Mercedes camper shenannigans.

[cobblers]

This thing is mega, I just want to hear it idling away on a cold frosty morning.

If you have a compressor fridge, a 130+W solar panel should run one indefinitely, there's no need to dedicate any real battery power to one. 

In fact my T6 has a single  (shite, renogy, flexible) 125W panel on it and that has been the only thing charging the leisure battery for the past 8 weeks. Fridge has been turned on non stop and I've camped in it once or twice a week since, charging phones, laptops and using the kettle off the mains inverter. I even cooked a curry in the little oven. Battery is currently at 88%.

Any cheap lifepo4 battery is gonna be ten times better than lead acid (eco worthy off amazon are cheap and good) but you can't really mount them outside because they won't charge when they're below freezing

[Floatylight]

1 hour ago, Talbot said:

Thank you for saying so.. I felt a bit bad making a cheapskate offer, as it was clear that he had put in a huge amount of work on the vehicle "back in the day", but at the same time, it's all I could offer for it.  I'm glad he is happy with the deal.

Electrically, I plan on having several split systems on this, likely with a battery devoted to the fridge, one for lighting/phone charging and another to run an inverter for when off grid.  I've already been looking at the space under the vehicle for batteries, and there's loads of room.  So much in fact that I can put ALL the batteries under there, along with a rather interesting split-charge arrangement to preferentially charge certain batteries before others.  I can also get a bigger fresh water tank, a decent size grey water tank and a hot water tank that can be fed from engine heat or a diesel hot-water heater.  I have many plans!

I think the hot water heater had a gas option that was never connected (probably on the basis it's under the bed and didn't want to risk  carbon monoxide poisoning.

[Talbot]

1 hour ago, cobblers said:

Any cheap lifepo4 battery is gonna be ten times better than lead acid (eco worthy off amazon are cheap and good) but you can't really mount them outside because they won't charge when they're below freezing

Insulated box and a teeny-tiny heater maybe?  If there is power to charge the battery, few watts spent on heating the battery should be insignificant I guess.

At the moment I will be sticking with Lead-acid, mainly because I already have a fair few useable batteries, but also because the weight benefit is very small compared to the weight of the vehicle.  Maybe when all the lead-acid ones are dead I will invest in some LiFePo4.  Probably second-hand ones tho....

[cobblers]

Yeah, some of the batteries have inbuilt automatic heaters but generally they're the premium ones.

BTW running a water heater off an inverter is doable, if you already have the water heater it's the most straightforward way - it's how I heated the water in my old Boxer. I had 8x lead acid batteries but it was equivalent to about 300 usable AH. One decent shower would take ~45-50AH out of the batteries (10l of water heated from 10c to 50c)

[juular]

How do you envisage charging the batteries normally?  

In my case they mainly get alternator charge, with solar backup.  If that's the case for you would it be worth running a coolant loop around the batteries?

Especially worthwhile if you were considering coolant loop water heating anyway.

If it's cold enough to affect the batteries I doubt the solar will be doing a great deal of heavy lifting, so it will mainly be charging on the go.

[stuboy]

My son recently visited the MB museum and saw this and said my dad would love this !!!

[Crackers]

1 hour ago, stuboy said:

My son recently visited the MB museum and saw this and said my dad would love this !!!

From memory that one had done some proper miles too. Think it had around 400k on the clock. Doesn't look it at all!! 

[wuvvum]

13 hours ago, Talbot said:

Which country is that you're in?

Aotearoa, innit?