ENDLESS ADVENTURE USA: ADDING MORE SOLAR & BATTERIES!

We arrived back in New York on August 1st and have been staying at my Dad's house in Westbury. We have been re-organizing and re-evaluating everything that we brought with us on our 8 month trip, our 1st Full-Timing adventure! We have gone through every cabinet, closet and storage bay. We may have over packed a few items, so anything that we did not use on this trip has been removed. We also re-evaluated our current Solar and Battery capacity and decided to increase it.

One of the things we did recently was to free up one of our storage bays so that we could use the space to add two more batteries. While we were on the road and having some service done on our RV we had
our single wet cell house battery replaced with an Exide Group 24 AGM RV/Marine Deep Cycle Battery. We also purchased a second identical battery and installed it ourselves in a space under our refrigerator. We wired the two batteries together and connected our single Go Power solar panel through the charge controller. At this point we had 95 Watts of solar and a 150 amp hour battery bank.

Also while we were on the road we ordered another 95 Watt Go Power expansion panel and recently installed it next to the other one up on the RV roof. It was a simple install with easy plug and play connectors. So now we have 190 Watts of Solar! We also ordered and installed a Jack Digital TV Antenna, replacing the old crank up unit. We also ordered and installed a Jensen 12 volt TV/DVD to run off of our battery bank. We may have a few other smaller projects to complete in the coming weeks.

Anyway, our most recent project was to install two more identical Exide batteries, that UPS dropped off the other day, to our battery bank. Since our storage bay has a very narrow door we had to remove the entire door and frame so that we could squeeze the two batteries in sideways and drop them into the battery trays that were bolted to the floor of the storage bay. It was a time consuming project, but we managed to get it done in one day. We will also be installing extra support under the storage bay using a piece of steel tubing connected to threaded rods that will run up through the interior floor. We don't want the extra weight of the batteries to cause any issue with the way the storage bay is mounted to the underside of the RV. We also have to re-route the conduit in and out of the bay and wire all the batteries together. Once the wiring is complete we will have a 300 amp hour battery bank ready for our next trip.

We are contemplating visiting the New England area this Fall and then heading down to the South East for January and February, making sure to be back in New York for my Nephew's wedding in early March. We can't wait to test out all of our new stuff on the road!

Regards,
Frank & Rene

PS: To view all of our trip photos, please go to our facebook page using the link below.

www.facebook.com/endlessadventureusa