We bought our 5th wheel last fall - a Forest River Cardinal that is about 31ft. long. As 5th wheels go this is a fairly small one but we think it will be big enough for just the two of us and Darby (our dog). It has all the basic 5th wheel stuff - living room, kitchen, bath with shower, a queen size bed and a considerable amount of storage.
Darby - Our 7 Year Old Mountain Cur
It was lacking a few things however. We wanted to have the ability to stop anywhere and be self sufficient so that meant we needed to add batteries, solar, an inverter, and wi-fi. We ended up adding 2 batteries to the existing 2 battery bank giving us 4 - 205 Amp batteries, We added 4 Renogy 100 Watt solar panels to keep the batteries charged, and a 1500 Watt pure sine wave inverter to give us the 120V power we would need for computers, electronics, lights,, etc when we were off grid.
The Battery Bank
The Solar Panels
Solar Charge Controller - Inverter
We also wanted to have decent Wi-Fi as much as possible whether we were at an RV park or elsewhere. We installed a Radiolabs Wi-Fi Repeater than is a high power external Wi-Fi antenna capable, under the right conditions, of connecting to wi-fi over a mile away. I have done some initial testing of it and it seems to work quite well - we will see how it goes. These were developed for marine applications but can work quite well on land with line of site or near line of site locations.
Our 5 Ft. Tall Wi-Fi Antenna
No comments:
Post a Comment