Hi Everyone,
Im new to the forum, but I’ve been reading for the last year or so. First of all, great site and you all really helped me make some decisions. Without boring you with my story, I’ll just say that my journey started about six years ago with an interest in truck campers and gettin out on the open road. Been traveling for work internationally and now I want to give my beautiful country the attention it deserves.
About three years ago bought a Ram 2500 6.4L with about 2900 lb payload. It’s a beast and I love it but I am pretty limited on TCs if I don’t want to push it to the limit. That leads me to where I am today because about a month ago I took delivery of a brand new Hawk Side Dinette. It’s fantastic, leaves me headroom for payload and my wife loves it as well.
Couple things I’m still learning and struggling to understand though. The Furnace and learning how to use my fridge better so it doesn’t eat up my battery.
For the fridge, At the beach with sun I’m cool and it gets plenty of power. But recently camped at elevation with too much shade and I saw my battery voltmeter dropping below 12.6 first night. I thought that you didn’t want to get that low so I just shut the fridge off and we used coolers for the most part. I’m setup with a 160w Solar panel and 2x6 volt batteries and was looking into a portable solar panel for the next time. What am I doing wrong here? FYI, I did charge for a couple nights on shore power and I put cold drinks inside to start the weekend, but seems like I ran out of juice too quickly.
Next is the furnace. I stayed warm with the thermal pack but I tried putting the furnace on and all it was doing was spitting out cold air. No idea what I’m doing here lol, i ran the stove burners on to get air out of the lines, I put up to 72 degrees on the thermostat, waited a couple minutes to see if warm air would blow but I got nothing. So I just said screw it we can just bundle up which worked fine. Again, what am I doing wrong here.
Here’s my options:
isotherm 85 ac/dc
Flush stove and fridge
no AC
side dinette
furnace
outside shower
tankless water heater
king bed
This thing is awesome and I can’t wait to get it out on the road for longer trips soon, but what do some of you more experienced guys think of the two situations I had?
RallyRock
Im new to the forum, but I’ve been reading for the last year or so. First of all, great site and you all really helped me make some decisions. Without boring you with my story, I’ll just say that my journey started about six years ago with an interest in truck campers and gettin out on the open road. Been traveling for work internationally and now I want to give my beautiful country the attention it deserves.
About three years ago bought a Ram 2500 6.4L with about 2900 lb payload. It’s a beast and I love it but I am pretty limited on TCs if I don’t want to push it to the limit. That leads me to where I am today because about a month ago I took delivery of a brand new Hawk Side Dinette. It’s fantastic, leaves me headroom for payload and my wife loves it as well.
Couple things I’m still learning and struggling to understand though. The Furnace and learning how to use my fridge better so it doesn’t eat up my battery.
For the fridge, At the beach with sun I’m cool and it gets plenty of power. But recently camped at elevation with too much shade and I saw my battery voltmeter dropping below 12.6 first night. I thought that you didn’t want to get that low so I just shut the fridge off and we used coolers for the most part. I’m setup with a 160w Solar panel and 2x6 volt batteries and was looking into a portable solar panel for the next time. What am I doing wrong here? FYI, I did charge for a couple nights on shore power and I put cold drinks inside to start the weekend, but seems like I ran out of juice too quickly.
Next is the furnace. I stayed warm with the thermal pack but I tried putting the furnace on and all it was doing was spitting out cold air. No idea what I’m doing here lol, i ran the stove burners on to get air out of the lines, I put up to 72 degrees on the thermostat, waited a couple minutes to see if warm air would blow but I got nothing. So I just said screw it we can just bundle up which worked fine. Again, what am I doing wrong here.
Here’s my options:
isotherm 85 ac/dc
Flush stove and fridge
no AC
side dinette
furnace
outside shower
tankless water heater
king bed
This thing is awesome and I can’t wait to get it out on the road for longer trips soon, but what do some of you more experienced guys think of the two situations I had?
RallyRock