Sunday 30 June 2013

Solar battery charger

The Bailey Pegasus GT65 caravans come with a socket in the battery box to plug in a solar panel.  We are not great users of sites without mains, so we didn't feel we particularly needed to use a solar panel on site.
However, it would be very useful to be able to keep the battery topped up while in storage, so that the mover stands a chance of working.  Obviously it would be better to keep the panel inside the 'van so it is less likely to get nicked.  So I pulled the spade connectors off the back of the built-in socket, and plugged them into some insulated spade sockets wired to a car lighter socket.  The picture shows the socket and the wiring with the in-line fuse before tidying up.
I bought a 10W panel and adapted its wiring by removing the rather cheap croc clips and fitting a length of Halfords twin speaker cable (we're only talking about a max current of a few hundred mA) and a car lighter plug.  I had to snip the LED out of the plug, as it would have wasted too much battery charge.
The panel just fits in the mini-Heki rooflight over the kitchen area, where it sits comfortably on the bars at the end of the flyscreen and blind, which have to be pulled out an inch or so.
It went into operation today, so we won't know how successful it is until we go to collect!

Update 3 July - the battery was charging at 13.3V on a cloudy bright afternoon.

1 comment:

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