Friday, January 20, 2012

Living In A Van (Off The Grid)


This guy has a pretty nice van. Since it is a 1-ton van, if he wanted to he could put a nice-sized battery bank in the back, underneath his sleeping area. I did that with my old Mobile Traveler 1-ton Dodge camper van. I had an 880 ampere/hour bank consisting of eight golf-cart batteries wired series-parallel for 12 volts, feeding a Trace 2500 watt inverter. That setup could run a 5,000 BTU air conditioner overnight, without running the generator. It weighed about 500 pounds, but that is nothing for a 1-ton. In fact it gave the van more traction. I drove it on all kinds of unpaved roads in the desert in Utah and Colorado, as well as muddy roads around Lake Superior and in the South. With those batteries in the back I never had a problem with wheelspin.