On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:18:13 -0700, Stephen Trapani
wrote:

Well, occasional microwave, charge cell phones, morning and afternoon
coffee, lights, and hopefully a TV/dvr.

Kind of putting it all together...

I haven't seen the "brick" powered TV's in quite a while. Maybe at a
flea market or something?

The Golf Cart batteries are the best. Two in series should be fine for
what you want, but let's see.

Daily power, taking your "list" above out of order:

First, to determine the daily power requirements you have to take the
current draw, Amps, of each thing and multiply by the number of hours
used to get the Amp Hours per day of each. Remember, anything powered
by the inverter is going to be the 120VAC Watts divided by 10 for 12V
Amps.

We'll do that below, with best guesses.

Lights: I'm sure your talking 12V ones. The anchor light is the
biggie, with incandescent at about 1.5 Amps for 12 hrs.

[ 18 Amp Hours ]

LED would be about 2 Amp Hours, but cost more than a couple more
battereis.

Inside lighting. Varies, but say 2.5 Amps for 5 hours.

[ 12.5 Amp Hours ]

Same as above for LED inside lighting, but not as expensive.

Charging cell phone: Negligible if you have a 12V charger.

Coffee:

We had a 10-cup with thermos type carafe. It drew 75 Amps and ran for
5 minutes. Just to make it easy, let's say 6 minutes, 1/10 of an hour
or 7.5 Amp Hours per pot. Morning and afternoon then are

[ 15 Amp Hours ]

Microwave: We get a bit iffy here. Our 800 or 900 Watt one, I forget
which, drew about 95 Amps. That works out to about 1.6 Amp Hours per
minute of use ( 95 / 60 ). So you don't want to use it too much.

Let's say a couple meals reheated and a few cups of coffee and put it
at 15 minutes. 15 X 1.6 =

[ 24 Amp Hours ]


TV/DVD: Ours, using both was about 5 Amps as I recall. Figuring 4
hours in the evening and 1 hour of news in the morning, that's

[ 25 Amp Hours ]


Adding it all up, the total is:

[ 94.5 Amp Hours per day ]

So you're looking at basically 2 days with your batteries.

With LED anchor and inside lighting,

[ 68 Amp Hours per day ] Quite a difference.

Basically almost 3 days.

Remember you don't want to totally kill your batteries.

Adding another pair of batteries will of course double that and is the
less expensive route then LED lighting.

Rick