Fantastic Fan Fantastic Fan Electrical Draw

anyone know the exact specs for amps drawn by the fantastic fans in our trailers? I can't find it on their website ...

 

Fernlane,

We just picked up our 560 in April and we had Cary install a TriMetric 2030RV meter. It measures and tracks all power entering and leaving you battery. It's not just a volt or watt meter that tells you "moment in time" battery level, but it shows you actual input and or output and that cumulative value. If you were consuming 100 watts by using a light bulb and generating 100 watts from your solar panel, the TriMetric would read 0. Just like your fuel gauge in your car only gives you a monument in time reading of fuel level, it does not give indication of rate of consumption, the TriMetric does.

Great for dry camping when you have to manage and sometimes conserve your power useage. Also great to answer your specific question. So the fan on high is 39.2 Watts and 18.8 Watts on low. I made a spreadsheet testing all appliances, turning each on individually, results below. Data is from our 2016 560 Ultra SUV model.

 

thanks, this is great stuff. My trimetric monitor is already on order along with a new AGM battery. The first AGM started losing capacity after one year and after two it won't run the dometic for 12 hours even in relatively cool temps. A real drag in a dry campground.

Hopefully the trimetric will allow me to monitor the battery state of charge and capacity so I can get longer life out of the new one.

I'll also likely need a higher wattage solar panel. I bought an 85 watt panel mainly because it fits nicely in my jetta sportwagen (yep, one of those ...). Seems to work fine in the sunny west but not enough for the shady east. Probably need a suitcase model but I'm going to pick carefully this time.

Any of y'all who want dig further into this whole battery/solar thing ought to check out the Northern Arizona Wind & Sun forum. NAWS is a good company and their forum has lots of good info.

Northern Arizona Wind & Sun Solar Forum

thanks again for the data. I look forward to generating my own.

Robert Dickson
Carrboro NC
550 ultra #645
109 nights, 23, 572 miles (but who's counting ...)

 

Awesome! Please share your data once you get it so we can compare notes. If you need any TriMetric programming help, let me know. It took me a bit to figure the whole thing out. You have to actually dive into the main menu and change some of the default settings to allow you to tell the TriMetric if you are using a 100 amp shunt or 500 amp shunt. Otherwise you'll get some erroneous readings.

 

I'd definitely be interested in some sort of power usage figures for the Dometic vs. power generation for say a sunny afternoon with a 100 watt solar panel. I'm not sure how you would do that, since there are no end of variables. But any sort of info for specific scenarios would be worthwhile.

We are considering wintering in Baja, and being able to keep the Dometic up and running for at least four or five days would be nice. But we'll likely have plenty of opportunity to road test our setup in the Southwest before crossing the border.

 

I would like to be able to provide some data, but we don't have solar panels yet and we don't have a Dometic cooler. If anyone does and also owns the TriMetric, then they could. Surely someone out there on the forum does and hopefully they will share their info.