Today I kicked of a test of my system with a few ideas in mind.
This afternoon I put a gallon of water in my freezer and most of a case of bottled water into the fridge section of my Dometic 1350 fridge.
It was sitting at room temperature when I kicked it on. Normally, I'd toss some ice into the freezer to help kickstart the cooling process but I wanted a full performance test of the fridge.
I'd originally wanted to start this earlier today, but actually the late start will be a better test of my battery capacity.
I started up my inverter (Victron Multiplus 3k/24)
I kicked the fridge on in auto mode, which will run it on A/C while there's power.
And then I left.
Meanwhile, I've been keeping an eye on it via the VRM portal.
I normally burn about 50w with my dometic cooler and monitoring, so discount that from the DC side.
Figuring on 500w, I'm estimating that I'll use 5-6kwh overnight before the sun comes out tomorrow.
Then I'll get to watch how well the system can both offset load and charge the pack.
What I'm really interested in watching is the SOC:
The other number I'm keeping an eye on is the AC wattage. It's been a solid 420w since I kicked this off.
I'm really curious to see if the fridge will tail off once it hits a target temperature.
If it does, I want to understand the average duty cycle and how much it'll burn in real life.
The mass of the water inside should help it stabilize. At that point, I'll have some interesting data.
Anyhow, I wanted to see how well this works - and how realistic it is to use my solar to precool the fridge before trips.
I'm pretty excited to actually challenge the battery like this. So far my testing has been short times of running a space heater or A/C unit to use up a Kw or whatever.
It's kinda of reassuring to measure how the system does with a nice consistent 21A discharge.
Realistically, I'm probably not going to mod or replace the fridge until later this year. That doesn't mean I can't experiment with cheap mods - like a fan on the HX system and seeing if there are ways to improve the efficiency of the fridge itself. Obviously there's nothing to be done for the heating element wattage, but I may be able to improve internal cooling or external heat exchange...
- Discharge testing of my new 14Kwh battery pack
- Energy consumption and offset when using my Absorption fridge
- Getting used to the discharge numbers and behavior of my new pack
- Evaluate just how off-grid I can be with the current configuration
- Validate my SoC info - I just calibrated the 100% value on my BMV, and I want to get used to the new charge/discharge curves.
This afternoon I put a gallon of water in my freezer and most of a case of bottled water into the fridge section of my Dometic 1350 fridge.
It was sitting at room temperature when I kicked it on. Normally, I'd toss some ice into the freezer to help kickstart the cooling process but I wanted a full performance test of the fridge.
I'd originally wanted to start this earlier today, but actually the late start will be a better test of my battery capacity.
I started up my inverter (Victron Multiplus 3k/24)
I kicked the fridge on in auto mode, which will run it on A/C while there's power.
And then I left.
Meanwhile, I've been keeping an eye on it via the VRM portal.
I normally burn about 50w with my dometic cooler and monitoring, so discount that from the DC side.
Figuring on 500w, I'm estimating that I'll use 5-6kwh overnight before the sun comes out tomorrow.
Then I'll get to watch how well the system can both offset load and charge the pack.
What I'm really interested in watching is the SOC:
The other number I'm keeping an eye on is the AC wattage. It's been a solid 420w since I kicked this off.
I'm really curious to see if the fridge will tail off once it hits a target temperature.
If it does, I want to understand the average duty cycle and how much it'll burn in real life.
The mass of the water inside should help it stabilize. At that point, I'll have some interesting data.
Anyhow, I wanted to see how well this works - and how realistic it is to use my solar to precool the fridge before trips.
I'm pretty excited to actually challenge the battery like this. So far my testing has been short times of running a space heater or A/C unit to use up a Kw or whatever.
It's kinda of reassuring to measure how the system does with a nice consistent 21A discharge.
Realistically, I'm probably not going to mod or replace the fridge until later this year. That doesn't mean I can't experiment with cheap mods - like a fan on the HX system and seeing if there are ways to improve the efficiency of the fridge itself. Obviously there's nothing to be done for the heating element wattage, but I may be able to improve internal cooling or external heat exchange...