Category ELECTRICAL

Camper van and RV electrical systems explained with real numbers: inverters, wire sizing, voltage drop and the faults that get blamed on the wrong component. Written from installations I’ve built and broken.

BATTERIES, ELECTRICAL, solar-climate

How Long Does It Take to Charge a Camper Battery With a Solar Panel?

Charging time depends on panel wattage, battery type, and actual hours of usable sunlight. A 100Ah AGM battery at 50% discharge needs roughly 9–14 hours of useful sun with a 100W panel, 5–7 hours with 200W, and 3–5 hours with…

BATTERIES, ELECTRICAL

Solar Charge Controller Not Showing Charge: How to Diagnose It

When a camper solar setup doesn’t seem to be charging, most people assume the panel is broken or the controller has died. But before you touch anything, it’s worth separating two different problems. One thing is that the controller isn’t…

BATTERIES, ELECTRICAL

How to Tell If Your Camper Battery Is Damaged or Worn Out

I noticed something was wrong with my AGM battery when it seemed to charge normally during the day but lost voltage fast once the sun went down. The voltage dropped much faster than before during nighttime use or under load…

BATTERIES, ELECTRICAL, Sin categoría

How to Wire an Auxiliary Battery in a Camper Van (Without It Draining)

If your auxiliary battery drains even though it’s properly connected, it’s almost always an installation mistake or a hidden load — not the battery itself. Learning how to wire an auxiliary battery in a camper van without it draining is…

BATTERIES, ELECTRICAL

Why Isn’t My Camper’s Leisure Battery Charging From the Alternator?

If you’ve got a camper van or motorhome and you’ve noticed the leisure battery isn’t charging — or charging poorly — while you drive, you’re not alone: it’s one of the most common faults, and also one of the most…

BATTERIES, ELECTRICAL

How Many Amp-Hours Do You Need in a Camper Van Battery?

How many Ah you need in your camper battery, calculated from your actual loads (lights, fridge, chargers, inverter) — not a generic number pulled off a forum. Here’s the formula I use myself, with real examples, so you don’t undersize your…

ELECTRICAL

Where to Place Fuses in a 12V Camper Electrical System

You can size every fuse in your camper perfectly and still get this wrong. The size protects against overcurrent — but where you physically install each fuse determines how much of your wiring is actually protected, and whether you can…

ELECTRICAL, Sin categoría

What Fuse Size Do You Need Between Battery and Inverter

Leisure battery connected with a ground cable and a positive distribution busbar

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…

ELECTRICAL

Why Does the Fuse Keep Blowing in My Camper’s 12V System?

Positive fuse block terminal on a 12V camper battery bank

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,…

ELECTRICAL

RV Water Pump Not Working After Filling the Tank: Step-by-Step Fix

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…