I’m sorry that I haven’t posted anything for a number of days but I have been away.
I was going to call out an Electrician to put an outlet in for my trailer. My trailer has an RV 30 amp plug but I was going to see about a box that would have a 50 amp, 30 amp and two 20 amp outlets. I doubt that I will upgrade to a trailer that needs a 50 amp supply but maybe when selling the house in the future, an electric car charging outlet would be a plus.
What changed my mind into buying a generator was that Kathy surprised me by saying she wanted to camp in some more isolated locations! Our trailer can go a few days without being connected to electricity or water. It has a freshwater tank, a grey water (sink and shower drain water) tank and a black water (toilet) tank. It also has propane that will run the furnace, hot water heater, stove, refrigerator and grill. Then it has batteries (or it will have, right now it has one small battery but I will upgrade it to two golf cart batteries in the near future). A trailers’ electric system is actually two systems, one is 120 volts and the other is 12 volts. If you are dry camping (not hooked to electricity or water) you run on your batteries but you loose the 120 volt system. This means you lose the microwave, TV, anything that is plugged into the outlets and the air conditioning. The 12 volt system gives you lights the radio and electricity to control the hot water heater, refrigerator and run the fan for the furnace. To keep from losing anything you can use a generator.
If you are going to use a generator you need to know how big of one to buy. If you buy one that is too big then it will be heavier, louder and use more fuel. If you buy one that is too small then you will not have enough power to run your trailer.
The two criteria that I was looking at in choosing a generator was power and noise.
Let’s talk about power. First when you look at the power ratings on a generator you will see two numbers listed. On the generator that I purchased it is 4000/3500. What that means is that this generator will take a load of up to 4000 watts temporarily but will supply 3500 watts continuously. To know how many watts you will need, you need to do some simple calculations. My trailer runs a max of 30 amps at 120 volts. Ohms law states amps X volts = watts, so 120 volts X 30 amps = 3600 watts. If you had a 50 amp trailer you would need a 6000 watt generator.
So now I know what size generator that I need, I wanted the quietest. The quietest generators seem to be what’s called inverter generators. A regular generator is simply an engine and an alternator. The engine must run at 3600 rpm at all times for the alternator to provide the required electricity. The engine running at full speed all the time makes these generators noisy and they use more gas. An inverter generator has a motor the turns an alternator also, but the electricity is then converted to dc and sent to an inverter. The inverter changes the electricity back to 120 volts and controls it so it is very clean. Without going in depth clean electricity has constant volts and hertz. If a regular generator fluctuates its engine speed then the electricity volts and hertz will vary which can be bad for all of your devises. Since an inverter generator is using electronics to control the electricity, if you are drawing a small load (amount of electricity being used is small) the engine can slow down making it quieter and more fuel efficient. The down fall to inverter generators is that they have a smaller output and are quite a bit more expensive. In fact I could not find an inverter generator that would provide anything close to the 3600 watts that I needed.
I found a compromise in Champions “Hybrid Generator model 100302”. It is a full inverter generator but on an open frame. This means that it does not have some of the sound dampening covers like a standard inverter generator. It is a little louder at 64 dB’s vs about 54-59 dB’s for a smaller fully inverter generator. The pros and cons are this. Pros it provides enough power to run everything on my trailer, it has an RV outlet, it runs 17 hours on fuel, it was nearly half the price of an inverter generator of the same brand (a quarter of the price of a Honda) and I got a free t shirt for leaving a review! The cons are that it doesn’t have an hour meter, it’s a little louder but you can barely hear it from inside the trailer, it’s not waterproof.
You can buy an hour meter for under $20. You just ground it to the generator and wrap a wire around the spark plug wire. I did this because you need to change the oil every 50 hours on a generator.
Sorry this got a little long, I will be doing a video review of the generator soon but I have to leave for work for a few more days.
See you at the campground
Katskamper.com
