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Originally Posted by DRanger
This weekend I arrived at my camping destination with a near dead TM battery on account of powering the fridge on DC while traveling.
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Old vaudeville line -
Patient: "Doc, it hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Don't do that."
In other words, you don't have to run the frig while traveling, unless you are running a really long day in really hot weather. Start with cold food, pack the refrig with ice or ice packs before you leave in the morning, and shut if off while you travel.
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My TV has a 400 W power inverter. Can I use it to connect to the TM for the purpose of powering the converter to recharge the battery?
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Maybe. Two things to bear in mind. First, you are going to take about 400 W at 12VDC out of the TV battery, convert it to 120 VAC in the inverter, then reconvert it back to 14 VDC in the converter. The combined efficiency of the pair of conversions may be around 70%, but not much more. Your 400 watts will become 300 watts, which is around 20 amps of charge current at 14 VDC. That is certainly enough to do some good, though it will take a while. Second, the inverter will draw around 30-35 amps out of your TV battery, which is enough to do it some harm in an hour or so. This means that for a serious charge, you have to run the TV engine. All good so far.
The big question in my mind is this. If the TM battery is seriously depleted, the converter will want to supply a serious amount of charge current - say 30 amps offhand. It will want somewhat more than 400 watts of input power. How will your inverter react to this demand? Will it overheat and fry? Will it switch itself off? Will it lower its output voltage to something less that 120 VAC?
On paper, you can tweak all these numbers a bit - volts, amps, efficiency, and I'm sure some of us will do that. But the result won't change much. Let us know if it works - it would be valuable to other TM'ers.
Bill