Just south of Broome about a 1.5hr drive is an operational cattle station with a camping ground overlooking the beach. There are shady small sites with limited power hookups (not enough to run the aircon). We chose to setup in the generator area because the sites were more spacious and had a wicked view of the beach. A great feature with Barn Hill is all sites have their own water taps. It was a great chance for us to give our washing machine a test drive.
We did plenty of swimming down at the beach which have rock pools to bath in. Lowana loved these! They have an onsite cafe which is famous for there vanilla slice. Right next to it is a playground for the kids, plus pet guinea pigs and goats. We spent most of our time here as you can imagine.
In the Prado we have a 69L dual zone fridge from ARB. It’s set to -15c on both sides and it’s our full time freezer. We have enough meat stored to last a few months. Running this around the clock is a 120ah lithium battery from itech world. When the freezer kicks in it pulls around 3.6amps but it cycles so I would guess a safe average of 2.5amps an hour. The battery gives 97amps of useable power before she’s flat. So theoretically if I turn the car off with a full battery I could park up for about 38 hours. It’s not always full. It’s a bloody good battery but I’m asking a lot from it.
While in Barn Hill I installed a permanent panel on the roof (110w) which runs directly to the dcdc charger. This provides around 3-5amps during the day which extends the 38 hour max a lot. I installed the anderson plugs in a way that still gives me the option to add more solar to really charge the battery up. The 110w solar on the roof and a 200w blanket really ensures we maximises free power on a sunny day which fortunately at the moment is everyday.
In the caravan we have an el cheapo 3000w inverter. It’s big enough to theoretically run the aircon which we haven’t tried yet. Overall it’s doing a great job with the coffee machine being used everyday which is essential to us. We decided to use it to run the washing machine, when suddenly on the third load it just went to sleep. The washing machine had a full load with soapy water and we couldn’t turn it on to drain it. This is the point where you raise your hand to your forehead and start scratching with frustration. Couple of swear words later and I think we have a flat battery problem.
The van has two lithium’s in a basic parallel connection. The battery furtherest from the projecta management system is the one I’ve added the inverter to. In between the two lithium’s is a 50amp midi fuse that has blown at some stage so the inverter was running off one lithium that wasn’t receiving any charge. And eventually this singled out battery gave up and went flat. So just like that we had to pack up and head for Broome for a new fuse. Thanks for having us Barn Hill!
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