Get this fuse undersized and it melts the first time you run a real load. Get it oversized “just to be safe” and it stops protecting anything at all — by the time it finally trips, the cable or the…
A fuse blowing once, out of nowhere, can be a coincidence — a power spike, a loose connection that touched metal for a split second, bad timing. But a fuse that keeps blowing, over and over, on the same circuit,…
Filled the tank, turned the tap, and nothing comes out — or the pump runs constantly but no water reaches the faucet? This is one of the most common camper electrical/plumbing problems, and in almost every case it’s not the pump…
Every guide to hot water in a van says the same thing about engine heat exchangers. Free hot water. Zero running cost. Uses waste heat you’re producing anyway. If you drive before you park, it’s the obvious answer. I paid…
If you go looking for how many amps a diesel heater draws, you’ll find numbers that don’t agree with each other. Eight to ten amps on startup, says one source. Seventeen or eighteen, says another. One to one and a…
Every van build starts the same way. You list your appliances, you add up the watts, you divide by 12, you multiply by the hours, and you get a number. Then you buy a battery slightly bigger than that number…
The consensus on this is settled and it goes like this: PWM controllers are fine for small systems. Under about 150 watts of panel, on lead-acid batteries, save the money and spend it on something else. That advice is well…
You go to bed with a charged battery. You wake up and it’s low, and nothing was switched on. Two completely different problems produce that, and they look identical from the outside. One is something quietly drawing current all night.…
My AGM battery is 150 amp-hours, it cost €250, and it is under a year old. It still works — and it will never hold a full charge again. Not dead — it still starts the day looking healthy. It…
Search this question and you’ll find the answer is yes. You’ll also find that most of the pages telling you so sell lithium batteries or air conditioners. That isn’t a conspiracy — they know their subject and their numbers are…