Still learning about the leisure battery

This weekend was our third consecutive non-electric equipped campsite. We're never sure what the leisure battery is capable of since in the VW California Beach, which Cleopatra is, there is no battery status display.

When not hooked up to site electric you have use of only the lights and cigarette lighter sockets (of which there are five in various useful places). The parking heater also works off grid, burning diesel to produce heat circulated by a small electric fan.

So usually our electricity consumption off grid is purely charging our phones, lights on in the evening and heater on as necessary. The battery has coped admirably with this.

Then last week I bought a coolbox that plugs in to a cigarette lighter. It was plugged in from leaving home last Friday until we noticed our phones weren't charging on Saturday afternoon.

A little investigation told me it was using 45 amps. Compared to the 2 amps a charging phone uses and it's not hard to see why the battery drained so fast.

So first lesson learned in the last few days is that the coolbox should only be plugged in if Cleopatra is plugged in.

The second lesson is that six hours of driving since last weekend wasn't enough to charge the leisure battery back up. The heater wouldn't come on at the same time as the lights this weekend.

As we're off grid again next weekend Cleopatra will be having her first every time plugged in to our house mains when we get home.

The other news from this weekend was that we made friends with a gorgeous golden Labrador called Jasper. He came over to see us while his owners were putting up their tent, ignoring their repeating calls for him to come back. He sat under our chairs seemingly content that we were paying more attention to him than they were. Jasper's owners thought kicking his football would encourage him to return but he bounded off to fetch it and sat back down with it under our chairs.

Jasper returned to sit with us on Sunday morning as his tent was being packed away. He had a little more energy as he'd only just got up and he flitted between us and two other campers eating their breakfast. I didn't get to see what he was doing when he got a real telling off, but he was in the porch of the large tent in front of us. He was made to sit in the car until his owners were ready to leave.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Baghera beach

Image
Our bikes were unlocked from the tree we attached them to five days beforehand when we decided we would spend the day on the beach to which we had walked for over an hour the previous day. It's not unheard of for us to take the bikes to France for a holiday and for us never to use them. Considering the Nice to Corsica ferry had charged us €70 for the extra length they added, I was pleased to be using them. Corsica didn't appear to be cycle friendly and our only option was to ride along the main road. For quite a significant portion there was a generous verge to cycle out of the way of the passing traffic, but at bridges and several places we had to share the road with the cars and lorries hurtling past. When we left the main road to take the route to the sea, after a time, we were blocked by the grounds of a campsite. Since there was no other road route around the perimeter there was not much choice but to push our bikes past the barriers and cycle through the s
Read more

Biarritz

Image
  October holidays are often about embracing autumn, wrapping up warm and enjoying walks in the countryside coloured flame red, orange and yellow. That was almost the holiday we thought we were going to be having this week after French fuel strikes and the inevitable shortages steered us towards a plan to visit northern Germany. The weather forecast had us rethink and decide to try our luck at getting fuel enough to make it to the southwest of France. This new plan was only hatched after we'd left home, about half of the way to Eurotunnel. We do love the sandy coast of France's Atlantic coast and have stayed everywhere from the Vendée down to Landes. So when the best of the weather was to be around Biarritz, a part of the coast we'd not yet explored, it seemed the ideal choice. We arrived in France at about 11pm and decided to use the Camping-Car Park at Incheville, a two-hour drive away in Normandy. We've stayed twice before and I checked the Camping-Car Park app a cou
Read more

West coast of France campervan tour

Image
Having decided there's no need to travel half way across a country between camping stays, to mix things up a bit, this summer's fortnight holiday will be spent along France's West coast, starting at Ile d'Oleron and then heading a couple of hours south for each of our other two bases. We were worried about a reported two hour delay near to the Folkestone Channel Tunnel terminal and so, before the Dartford Crossing, we put back our scheduled train by 90 minutes. The traffic was just clearing as we got nearer and as it turns out we'd have been ten minutes early for our original booking. The delay meant it was already 10.30pm by the time we were on French roads and wouldn't reach our chosen aire, Neufchattel en Bray, until 1am. Unfortunately the aire was completely full and so we had no choice but to continue. We arrived at our second choice of aire at 3am. The two extra hours drive through the night meant two hours less the following day though. We d
Read more