MOD: Smart Thermostats in an RV? YES!

Original Thermostat

Original Thermostat

If you’re like me, you tend to sleep with the temperature quite a bit colder than your daytime setting.  My specific setpoints are:
76 °F for the day time, and 68 °F at night for the summer.
71 °F for the day time, and 64 °F at night for the winter.
While it’s a little thing, it’s becomes tedious to do these settings changes every evening / morning, especially knowing there are so many programmable and/or Smart thermostats on the market for the household climate control systems.

However, the RV world is woefully lacking of any type of programmability on the thermostats.  Worse yet, RV AC/Heatpumps have some things stacked against them when looking for aftermarket kit:

  • RV AC/Heatpumps made the weird choice to use 12 Vdc control panels (instead of 24vac) — as if you could run them without 120 Vac power?
  • RVs can often have more ‘heat’ options than our sticks & bricks brethren.
  • RVs also tend to have two speed fans in our AC/Heatpumps

This all combines to make replacing an RV thermostat with anything other than the OEM unit a daunting task.

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MOD: TESLA Powered Tiffin!

That is not a typo… our RV is now powered by TESLA! Well, Tesla battery modules that is! Oh, and the Sun! Yes, the Sun, too!

WARNING — This post is full of technical content. Here’s the TLDR;

Our original House batteries only powered part of our coach via the inverter, and could only power the coach in a boondock situation for about 4 to 6 hours. After that, the battery voltages were below 11.8vdc and we’d have to start the Generator.

Our new Tesla batteries can power ALL of the coach, not every load in parallel, but 2 of 3 ACs can be running at the same time! Given the same loads that would only last 4 to 6 hours on the old batteries, we can now last indefinitely on the batteries / solar combo!

Check the bottom of the post for loads of photos!

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Tire Pressure: Great to see it, but what should it be set to?

A couple months back, we posted about how a TPMS saved our bacon (link to that post).  A TPMS is great, but what should your tires be inflated to?  This is a question that many new RV’ers have because, in their regular drive around town car, they just inflate to the pressure listed on the door post of your car (you do.. right?).

The right answer for RV’s is a bit more complicated.
Warning: Lots of words ahead!
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