If You Give A Man A Camper… The Power Struggle
It’s a play on Laura Numeroff’s children’s book, ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’, but it still rings true. If you buy a man a camper, he’ll need to make some modifications. For this first part, this is all about the power upgrades and the initial struggle of trying to learn how solar works.
We bought the camper because of not only the size of camper we needed, but it did seem to have the best layout of all truck campers in that bracket (no slide outs, bathroom in the center and a good size kitchen). Shortly after we bought it, we had an orientation. A salesman went over the essentials of the camper. Here’s where the battery is, here’s how the jacks work, here’s where the propane is, etc. They were also kind enough to show us how not to over-extend the rear canopy … by over-extending the rear canopy for us. And then they had to fix that before we took delivery. During the orientation, I had a notepad and was jotting notes furiously, until I couldn’t read my own handwriting and figured, there must be an owners manual. I’ll just rely on that. Once we got the first truck and had the dealership load it on the truck for us, they tossed us the keys (more than one key for a camper which I didn’t take notes on) and waved us off as if we had bought many previous RVs before. Proceeded by me, driving a new truck, white knuckled, with a 1.5-ton camper strapped to the back in evening rush hour traffic.
Off track. When we bought the camper, it had a 100w solar panel on the roof and a 100-amp AGL battery in the battery compartment. From what I learned (aka Jamie learned), you can’t make a bag of popcorn in the microwave while boondocking with that kind of power. We needed more juice. I’m not an electrician, so we took our newly acquired camper to a small dealer that promises small prices, near home and we started talking about power. We want to be able to live off the grid for potentially weeks at a time, and we don’t want worry about power. They roped us into a solar panel upgrade (two 200W panels), 400 Amps of lithium battery, and a 3000W inverter, which turns battery juice into 110W plug juice (aka normal wall socket in your house). Looking at the battery, picture something about the size of an average Yeti ice chest, but weighing about as much as an actual Yeti (the creature). “Will that fit in our battery compartment?”, we ask. Absolutely, we had our tech measure and everything. “Ok, if you say so. Here, take our money… “
Work begins on upgrading our power. We’re not on a time constraint and not leaving until June 2026, so no rush. However the dealer has had some turnover and we now have a new team assigned to the job and they’ve got some questions about our upgrades. The battery we bought, that the tech assured would fit in the BATTERY SECTION, will not fit so they want to take up room in the rear of the camper that we had already determined would be room for travel stuff (shower, tools, eventually a generator). That will not work. We had to downgrade to two 100Ah Lithium batteries that did in fact fit into the compartment batteries were made for. Another issue, the solar, the batteries, and this inverter are still not enough to microwave a bag of popcorn, but your batteries will stay well charged. What is the point of all these upgrades if I can’t have my Orville Redenbacher popcorn!? And lastly, the placement of solar panel # 2 is not where I pictured its location in my head. It’s now located in the cargo tie down section on the roof taking up half of the cargo space for the roof. Sorry guys, but, while I appreciate the upgrades, I’m not happy about the “creative liberty” the dealer took.
As you’ll read about soon enough, this power struggle was not over and a lot had to happen before we were able to say, WeirbackOnTrack …
