crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on May 28, 2010 9:47:17 GMT -5
Not sure if this is true of all older Shastas, but my '66 Compact had no 12 volt system inside - only 110. There was a dome light that seemed to be wired to the trailer lighting system. I wanted to add more lighting that did not require that I be connected to 110 and I wanted to install a water pump, vent fan, etc -- all that ran on 12 volts. So I went about trying to figure out how to accomplish this all from scratch. I wired a few more lights, taking advantage of the fact that the ceiling was open while I was replacing it (water damage from previous owner). I ran 12 volt lines everywhere that I thought I might want lights -- under cabinets, inside the exterior hatch (where jacks, hookups, etc are stored), etc. I also ran wires for a fan-equipped roof vent that I had purchased online to replace the original one. Initially, I ran this all outside to a vehicle hook-up and found that everything worked! Inspired by my success so far, I purchased a battery storage box (my intent is to mount it next to the Propane tank on the tongue) and hooked it all to a car battery that I had in my garage (it never make it back to the store for my core credit when I replaced one in my mini-van a year or so ago -- heck, I guess that inaction sometimes pays off!). Now, everything worked without needing to be hooked to a vehicle! But -- I knew that this setup was only temporary. I researched what modern RVs have to provide 12 volt power while hooked to "shore power." What I found ran the gamut, both in terms of price and power. Keep in mind that this is a '66 Shasta that is only 10 feet long -- how many things could you possibly need to hook up! I did not need 60 amps! By luck, I found a nice looking unit sold by American Enterprises on e-Bay. Here is a link to the product site (updated in 2012 - note that American has updated their product line and this one is more expensive than the one I purchased on eBay, but the older models are still available on eBay). www.americandirect.org/Converters.htmlI ordered it and a few days later, it arrived. I spent some time trying to decide where to locate it -- it needed to be accessible because there are both 12 volt fuses and, what I later learned, spots to install even 110 volt breakers! I finally decided that a spot under one of the benches would be perfect (see picture). The system hooks to your 110 wiring and provides a little over the 12 volts when hooked to shore power. The system also hooks into a 12 volt battery so when you are disconnected from 110, it allows your 12 volt items to run on the battery. And, when you reconnect to 110, it charges the battery. Pretty slick! The installation went great and, while the instructions were somewhat sparse -- I figured out where to hook the 12 volt battery. Seems to work well! I had to pick up a 15 amp breaker that I use to switch the unit on and off when I don't want any power in the unit (i.e. while driving). I also had to provide my own 12 volt blade fuses. There are room for 5 circuits, each with it's own fuse, so the unit doubles as a fusebox. The battery circuit also has a fuse and the system itself has an indicator light on the front in the event that you get a short, an overload or something else. Have not yet had that problem! I still need to mount the battery box to the trailer tongue some way and I will eventually need to purchase a deep cycle RV battery, but the car battery works well for the time being. The converter cost me under $80 delivered. Attachments:
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Post by Atomic Addiction on May 29, 2010 1:35:25 GMT -5
Nice write up. I really have little information about battery setups in my information stock pile. Every little bit helps.
Thanks Brian
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safetybruce
2K Post Member
Miss Alabama 1961
Posts: 2,547
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Post by safetybruce on Jul 24, 2010 2:09:57 GMT -5
Great information. Will be referencing it for an upgrade in my '61 Compact when the time comes. Thanks for sharing.
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Ian
50 Post Member
Trailer noob
Posts: 81
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Post by Ian on Sept 27, 2010 11:10:21 GMT -5
Great writeup! Our '66 Compact came with a battery and some 12V wiring for lights and a stereo, but the battery is so old I'm pretty sure it's dead. I hate the idea of adding 50 lbs of battery to the poor little compact, but I do like the idea of a modern system like yours, maybe tied to a small 12V battery.
I'd also like to tie it to the towing vehicle to charge the battery while driving.
Cheers, Ian
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Post by hastashasta on Dec 27, 2010 4:17:10 GMT -5
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B.Tal
100 Post Member
"Leola" before rescue
Posts: 142
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Post by B.Tal on Jun 16, 2011 20:04:31 GMT -5
Thanks for sharing! this is exactly what I wanted to do!
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Gone Kayaking
1K Post Member
long live the Vintage Shasta Trailer Forum....we're gone but you are not forgotten!
Posts: 1,600
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Post by Gone Kayaking on Jun 17, 2011 8:35:55 GMT -5
perfect timing, i'm shopping for that part of the system right now!
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Stephanie
New Member
1971 Shasta Compact
Posts: 27
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Post by Stephanie on Jun 21, 2011 8:14:52 GMT -5
Hello I have a '71 Compact and just purchased a fan-tastic vent that runs on 12v. Great info and very much appreciated!!! I am looking to see if there is a wiring diagram on here I love this forum!!!!
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Gone Kayaking
1K Post Member
long live the Vintage Shasta Trailer Forum....we're gone but you are not forgotten!
Posts: 1,600
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Post by Gone Kayaking on Jun 21, 2011 8:36:00 GMT -5
btw I've basically converted all of the lights to 12v along with the fan and also installed several of the cigarette lighter style 12v receptacles.
Then I have two 110 outlets on either side of the trailer for when I'm on shore power. I'm also installing a small inverter to run 110 stuff when I'm just on the battery.
now if I can just figure out how to get my taillights working.
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Post by trixie1946 on Jun 25, 2011 15:00:30 GMT -5
I too am looking for a wiring diagram for my Shasta. Model unlknown at this time but the VIN # is P13450. It is titlted as a 1968. I want to get my running lights working. Any info would be greatly apprciated and THAT is an understatement. Thanx in advance. Trixie.
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crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on Jun 17, 2012 8:38:11 GMT -5
We sold the '66, but I have installed the identical setup in my '60 Shasta Airflyte and it works equally well. Just added the inboard battery yesterday so the project (well, at least the electrical part of my project) is done!
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Post by lopo on Jun 17, 2012 15:23:46 GMT -5
Crowelle, would you, or perhaps another member, possibly have a link to one of those whatever it is that you installed in 2010, or a better description? That link in your original post is no longer good.
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cowcharge
1K Post Member
I suffer from Shastasomiasis.
Posts: 1,471
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Post by cowcharge on Jun 18, 2012 3:17:51 GMT -5
Progressive Dynamics makes a series of converters that do a good job of running your 12v stuff and charging, as they have automatic, variable-voltage 4-stage charging depending on the state of charge of your battery (called "charge wizard"). I got one that puts out 45 DC amps max (although so far I've never seen it go over 21 when charging, it's a PD9245 like this one: www.ebay.com/itm/Progressive-Dynamics-45-Amp-RV-Converter-PD9245C-w-PEND-/350427400382#ht_4967wt_906) They make them both as stand-alones that use a regular plug in 110 outlet (if you already have a 110v breaker box and just want to add 12v), and built-ins that include distribution/breaker panels like some of the ones folks here have installed. I got my plug-in version for about $125 on Ebay, it's worked great on my giant golf cart batteries for the last year and a half. Runs all my 12v stuff including all my lights, furnace, and 1000-watt inverter (powering TV and/or desktop computer or my power drill and shop vac) and charges the batteries at the same time. I'm off-grid, so all my 110 comes from a little 800-watt generator at the moment. Until I get to rebuilding the dinette area where all the electrical stuff lives, I have the inverter and converter screwed into the wall, and plug the converter into the 110 outlet above the dinette table, and the shore power cord into the generator. If you want to charge your camper battery from your car while driving, you need a battery isolator switch. It waits until your car battery is charged after being drained by starting, then switches your alternator over to charging a second battery. I got one at NAPA auto parts, they're rated by the amps output of your car's alternator, so you need to know what size alternator you have in order to get a switch that can handle the alternator output. They're not very expensive ($30 IIRC for a 95-amp version), I put one in the van when I had my batteries and inverter in the van to run my computer. You can see in the pic the slapped-together battery box I made out of an old cut-up computer desk. The golf cart batteries are in the middle, the converter's on the right, the inverter's on the left. The isolator switch is rubber-mounted in the engine compartment with sheet metal screws, on the wheel well. I used 8-gauge stranded wire to connect everything, I ran one long hot wire through the "doghouse" behind the engine to the batteries, and the battery ground to a rear seatbelt mounting bolt in the floor. You could easily just make the charging wires long enough to reach the camper if you wanted, and tape them alongside the trailer light harness. I also used an old extension cord to make a long 12v jumper cable off the batteries for the Hell of it (since my BIL ran over it with the weed whacker and there was a good thirty feet of it still good). Trixie, most of the time, exterior light problems come from bad grounds. The old trailers were grounded through the skin, so if your light mounts are corroded you won't get a good connection. If you have your walls torn apart you might consider adding ground wires from the lights to the frame. Oh wow, just realized how old this thread is, lol. Attachments:
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crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on Jun 18, 2012 8:35:19 GMT -5
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crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on Jun 18, 2012 8:51:51 GMT -5
I updated the product link in the original post... Note that they have updated their product line and the one featured on website is $170, but you can still find the lower priced/power models on eBay. I just search on RV Power Converter. Don't be confused with power INVERTERs though in your search. These do the opposite -- convert 12 volt to 110 volt through the magic of DC to AC conversion and sine wave filtering... www.americandirect.org/converters.html
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cowcharge
1K Post Member
I suffer from Shastasomiasis.
Posts: 1,471
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Post by cowcharge on Jun 18, 2012 10:20:39 GMT -5
My 1000-watt Xantrex inverter (great company, they make a lot of the huge grid-tie solar inverters people use on their homes) was $69 on Ebay. It's not pure sine wave, but it runs my desktop computer fine, with 75-watt 5.1 surround including subwoofer, and my giant old tube TV that I haven't replaced yet. What I've read says that it's battery chargers like for cordless tools that have the most trouble without the pure sine wave. Not sure why that is.
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crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on Jun 18, 2012 11:03:23 GMT -5
cowcharge- great info on the inverter. I've toyed around with the idea of getting one like your $69 one for my rig for those rare times I want to run a 110v item when boon-docking or enroute and at rest stops/etc. I'm assuming to run something like a small microwave for a minute or two would probably deplete my single 12 volt battery? Wondering how much (i.e watts) you can attach and how long you can run before you need to recharge the battery. I guess I could also add a second battery.
I also like the idea of charging camper battery using the tow vehicle. Right now I have my systems separate and have to be on shore power to charge. I would suppose that this setup would allow vehicle alternator to provide 12 v. power to the camper as well when vehicle is running?
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crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on Jun 18, 2012 11:18:29 GMT -5
I agree with cowcharge, Progressive Dynamics makes a great product too. I especially like the wired Wizard pendant that comes with many of the units. You can place the Pendant somewhere in your camper to monitor the charging system and manually override the auto settings. Plus it has a little wizard holding a nifty flashing LED --> which automatically makes it 150% more attractive to us gadget nuts... Here is a link to an all in one power center if you need something like the American converter I referenced above. www.progressivedyn.com/all_in_one_pd4000.html
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crowelle
100 Post Member
'60 Shasta Airflyte
Posts: 130
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Post by crowelle on Jun 18, 2012 11:33:56 GMT -5
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cowcharge
1K Post Member
I suffer from Shastasomiasis.
Posts: 1,471
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Post by cowcharge on Jun 18, 2012 13:04:23 GMT -5
Yup, if the battery is still hooked up it will still power the camper while charging from the car. But a V8 car makes a pretty inefficient generator, and of course, you would never have someone riding in the camper using the 12v stuff while towing, right? Ok, you asked for it, lol. How long you can run off your battery before your lifestyle has to get more primitive, or you need to recharge (or, if you're lucky enough to have not bought your battery bank yet and have money, how large a bank you need to buy in order to maintain your lifestyle between charges, which is a much more satisfying way to plan it, except for price) depends on two things. The amp-hour capacity of your battery bank, and the amp-hour draw you need to be able to supply to make your particular camping experience a good one with your needs. I always advise people to make a list of every appliance in their camper, the projected time each one will be used per day, the amp draws of each one, and then total them all up, in amp-hours. Right down to the last lightbulb, so you always know what you can do, and don't have to decide in the middle of the woods whether you want to be able to read at night or stay warm. For example, let's say that every morning you "need" to use a 1000-watt coffee maker for an hour and a 1500-watt hair dryer for 20 minutes, both running on 110v from your inverter. Watts = Amps x Volts, so for the coffee maker, 1000Watts/110Volts=9.1Amps AC draw whenever it's running. 9.1Amps x 1hr= 9.1amp-hours AC per day for coffee. For the hair dryer, 1500W/110V=13.6A AC. 13.6A x .3Hr=4.5 AH AC for every good hair day. Add them together, you get 13.6AH daily requirement in AC amps. To convert 12v DC battery power into 110V AC power takes 10-12 Amps DC used per Amp AC created. Which means to get your 13.6AH for coffee and hair every day off the battery, you need 136-163.2 AH DC battery capacity (I always calculate using the higher number, to give some elbow room and to allow for inefficiency losses in the wires and inverter). Which is why people don't boondock with hair dryers and coffee makers unless they have a generator running every day. All electrical appliances have data plates on them that show how much they draw, usually in watts (so you have to divide by 110v), or in more industrial things like power tools, amps. The 12v stuff you don't have to convert using the 10-12 inverter multiple, because they're not powered through the inverter but straight off the battery (although you may still have to divide by 12v to get the amps if they are rated in watts). Just add their DC amp draws together to get your DC requirements and then add them to the converted AC requirements to get the total electricity you want to use per day. My regular 12v lightbulbs draw about 2 A DC for example, so 6 hrs of reading in bed with one lightbulb would use 2A x 6Hr = 12 AH DC. My hot air furnace uses about 4 Amps DC when the fan comes on, which is about a third of the time in Maine winter temps. So to run it all night, it would be 4A x 1/3 duty cycle x 8Hr = 10.7 AH DC. Together the two of them would require 22.7AH DC per day. Just add them all up, divide by .8 because you never want to discharge your battery more than 80% (and 50% is even better for long battery life), and you will have the total size of the battery bank you need to buy, if you can recharge it fully every day. If you can't recharge every day, then you also have to multiply the total daily requirements by the number of days between charges to get the battery bank size you need. For things like 12v lightbulbs or old furnaces that don't have stickers telling you their power usage, put an ammeter on them and measure it directly, that's how I know what my lights and furnace take. There's more math to do on the supply side if your recharging is done by generator or solar panels as opposed to shore power hookup, because while shore power can give you thirty amps or more of AC to more than fill your charging needs, a generator or solar panels may not supply enough. A 2000-watt Honda can pretty much cover anything because it puts out 2000/110=18 or so AC amps, which through a converter should be able to push 180 DC amps (converted backwards), and no camper converter I know of pumps out that much into a battery, and I'm not sure there are any batteries that could take that much if it did without turning into mini-Hindenburgs. My PD converter says it can output 45 amps, but I've never seen it put out any more than 20-25, and it slowly decreases as the batteries get more charged. I suspect it would only approach 45 amps if the batteries were dead flat. So to do the math backwards assuming 20a of charging current, 20A DC being pushed into a battery for an hour will replace 20AH. So to replace your 163AH coffee/hair usage at 20A would take roughly 8 hrs of running the generator every day. Another reason people don't bring hair dryers and coffee makers on boondocking trips. For solar panels, the best you can hope for is about 6 hours of charging time per day when it's nice and sunny, in the summer. To use the hair/coffee example, to replace the 163AH in 6 hours, you would need to push 27 amps into your batteries (163AH/6Hr). Which means you would need 27A x 12v = 324 output watts from your panels, and a charge controller capable of at least 30 amps (you need a separate charge controller for solar because you can't feed your 110AC-powered converter with DC solar panels). A "High Output" 260-watt solar setup from Camping World costs $1500. Ready to toss the coffee maker and hair dryer yet? You can build 60-watt solar panels yourself for less than $100, if you don't mind soldering a lot of wires. Build 6 of them and you can bring the coffee maker and the hair dryer, as long as you don't want to see or stay warm at night. Two 100-AH AGM deep cycle batteries cost about $440 online, which would cover your hair and coffee for one day, or my furnace and light bulb for a little over 7 days before needing to be recharged. Tired of my hair and coffee analogy yet? ;D So, there's the math. You have to balance your needs for electricity with the amount of equipment you can afford to supply it, and whether you can or want to use a generator for charging. Car/marine batteries are not deep cycle batteries (no matter what it says on those "marine/deep cycle" batteries, they are only slightly better than car batteries and aren't meant to be deep discharged). If a battery is rated by cold cranking amps (CCA) instead of amp-hours it's a starting battery for engines and almost certainly unsuitable for use in a camper unless that's all you can lay your hands on. Discharging them as far as you do a camper battery will kill them, as all batteries lose lead from the plates every time they get discharged, and car battery plates are too thin to take it for long. I hope this all made sense to you, it sure didn't to me.
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