Quote: Islay Corbel wrote in post #15
A lot of people are using the remoska with solar power.
Note: admin may prefer to move this to a technical area!
From my experience of using and providing "0ff-grid" power systems the use of high wattage appliances requires more solar and battery capacity than a typical touring caravan can realistically accomodate. Generators usually become the default power source despite recent advances in "green" energy.
The Remoska is probably one of the lowest powered 230v kitchen/domestic appliances and warrants consideration, so a few figures if anyone is interested.
My early generation Remoska is rated at 470 watts at 230v AC, assuming this is getting power from a 12v DC habitation battery and using an inverter of typically 80% efficiency then the DC power we require is approx. 590W, which gives us a current draw from the battery of 50 amps. A typical cooking time with a Remoska is 40 mins, so our cooking session is using 33Ah of our battery capacity.
A typical habitation battery has a capacity of 100Ah, however, the recommendation is not to discharge below 50% so a usable 50Ah of capacity. Therefore we can (in theory) cook our delicious Remoska meal or baking extravaganza, but only the once until we recharge the battery! Hopefully the cooking isn't being done at night with lights on, TV on, heater blower running and water pump cutting in = part cooked meal eaten in the cold and dark :) Don't expect to use the motormover either ;)
Note that a further battery derating is necessary if the current drawn is higher than that used to establish the 20 hour rate (a constant current for 20 hours, e.g. 5 amps) and if operating outside of the specified temperature range. The battery life will also be significantly reduced if the discharge cycles are at high currents. Latest generation batteries can address the issues of deep discharge/recharge and high cycle rates/cycle life to mitigate these restrictions as part of a full power design.
Now how does our solar power cope with recharging the battery? First off we have to arrange for some bright clear skies for several hours to take full advantage of our ideally situated pitch without any shadowing. Our solar system will then provide us with a charging source based on:
solar panel wattage x system efficiency x peak sun hours, lets say 100W x 75% x 6 hours as typical figures, gives us approx. 36Ah back into the battery (although the battery recharge efficiency is 90% so actually only 32Ah available).
So we can recover our energy for the Remoska session - maybe.
Popular enquiries for using mains appliances in a caravan: hairdryer, vacuum cleaner, microwave cooker, cooking appliances various, air-con.
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