We were in a Forest Service campground recently which was fantastic – it was quiet and near a stream and was exactly what we wanted for a few days. Our only issue was POWER – my power-hungry laptop will suck up every drop of electricity it can, while sounding like a jet engine! But, when you’re working (YouTube work) ya kinda need it.

So, we started looking at other options after seeing a significant loss overnight (when my laptop wasn’t connected). What could be drawing so much at night?

In our rig, here are our typical power hungry items :

12V Offenders:

• Refrigerator fan
• Camper lighting
• Radio
• Water Pump
• Inverter*
• Solar chargers (x2)*
• Victron 3kW inverter*
• Victron Cerbo with GX Touch monitor*
• Reico Leveling jack controller
• Transfer switch (switches between generator and shore power automatically)
• MaxxAir fans (x2)
• Our Pepwave router and antenna

* click here to see our entire electrical system

110V Offenders

• Microwave
• TV
• Phone chargers
• Laptop charger
• Camera battery chargers
• Chargers for our 12V portable fans
• LAPTOP

While I knew that “wall warts” (cell phone chargers) still take power even when not charging, for some reason I hadn’t thought of that impact with our inverter. According to the specs, the Zero Load Power is 20W for a 3000W inverter. So based upon that assumption, I would lose around 40Ah daily with it just sitting around.

If I include what I was measuring when I have everything that’s off but powered, I was getting around 5A continuous overnight, or 40Ah overnight alone. If you turn that into a 24-hour rating, that’s 120Ah daily!

So, what does this mean?

What this means is that if we just let the camper sit (assuming no solar input) without us doing anything, my 4 100Ah Battleborn batteries would basically be toast in 3 days. That kinda sucks. Especially since that’s without us touching anything!

Ok, then what’s your plan?

So, we tried a simple experiment – we turned off the inverter overnight which automatically turned off all the 110V items but still left all the 12V items connected. Our overnight draw was 4Ah instead!

Well, let’s not get too excited, though. That means that my cell phone and watch and camera batteries weren’t being charged overnight like I’m used to. And we all need our phones charged!

So instead, here’s our plan going forward when boondocking:

• Charge essentials (phone, camera equipment, etc) during the day when we have a chance for sun
• Turn off inverter at night
• Turn off inverter during the day unless we need 110V stuff
• Try to stay in a location where I can use my solar (face south if possible)
• Use our generator when needed (try to do this early evening)

Honestly, I’m not sure why we hadn’t thought about this before. The beauty of this new plan is that it’s really not that disruptive (if you have an easy way to shut off your inverter). Our system allows us to turn off the inverter using our touch display or through a Bluetooth connection – so no crawling in the basement.

This certainly helps provide more juice for my wattage-eating laptop!

Details, Details…

Yes, I know that the Inverter is not 100% off since it’s still “listening” to see if I send a Bluetooth signal to it to turn it back on. And yes, I also know that my 2 MPPT solar chargers also have idle current (about 1/4A each per spec). But the above plan certainly reduces the draw considerably while making very minor changes for me. Finding a way to turn off the solar chargers would require a new switch and probably me going out to the basement to turn it on/off (I’m too lazy for that kind of stuff).

I hope this helped you as well to add another option in your mental toolbox for boondocking comfortably!

Pepwave Router

Right now our Pepwave Router has a fuse that I could remove to turn off but it’s not that convenient. In our brief check, it didn’t seem to be drawing much of anything (I did disable both SIM cards using the admin page but didn’t unplug it). As an alternate, we thought of simply adding an enable switch somewhere in the current fuse panel area later if need be. If we do further checks, I’ll add that here!