RV Living

What life in an RV is all about for us.

EV 4 RV — Power for your Coach and Electric Vehicle while on the road!

Ever wanted to own an Electric Vehicle (EV) but live in a motor coach and didn’t think it was possible. THINK AGAIN! For under $1000 you can build a system into your motor coach that not only powers your rig, but also will Level 2 Charge an EV off the SAME 50 or 30 AMP connection your RV plugs into. All without blowing that 50 AMP breaker! So dream no more…You can do it! You can own a Tesla, or any EV, and live on the road!
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By Michael, ago

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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By Michael, ago

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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By Michael, ago
MastodonLehnanne @ TurtleToot.usMichael @ TurtleToot.us