Solar Project Momentum 21G

[acoleman43]

basically, all the wires that were connected to your battery on the tongue, need to be connected to your new battery.

You have +/- to generator, +/- to main distribution panel, +/- to solar charge controller, +/- to tongue jack, +/- to emergency brake. Those will all need to be connected to your new battery.

You can add another set of busbars under the front of the trailer to handle the current load...connect all these cables/wires to the busbars, then one cable from the busbars to the new battery. That may be easiest.....

[bbinge]

I just want to post an update and thank everyone for their help. The system is finally working, but I had to change out the battery, which was probably for the best anyway. I did disconnect the trailer tongue battery, and I did find all those wires and get them reconnected to the battery bus bar inside the storage / new battery compartment, and rerouted at least one to the existing bus bar that was under the trailer. Anyhow, everything was working fine, but the Renogy 200ah LiFePo battery was a lemon out of the box, and caused a lot of unnecessary troubleshooting from me.

Basically the Renogy 200ah battery would charge to 100% (~13.3v) but as soon as you put any load (and I mean ANY load on it, from phone charger to Renogy's own 2000W inverter) it would immediately drop to ~7v and the whole system would shut down because the components would think that the battery was extremely undervolted. Then the load would "disappear" from the Renogy battery, so it would jump back to 13.3v and then inverter, etc. would reset put a load back on the battery, and BAM! The battery would drop to 7v again. This happened in an endless loop.

Queue the next 3 months fighting with Renogy support, spending hours doing tests, sending videos, explaining everything over and over. All I can say is that I will never buy anything from Renogy ever again. Finally, a couple of days ago they agreed to ship me another battery BUT 3 months without a working battery in the prime of camping season here in Colorado was not going to fly with me, so I ended up buying two EG4 LL 12v 400ah batteries. Working in IT and having taken a cannablized server battery down the Grand Canyon on a 3 week raft trip, I wished I would've learned about these server rack batteries sooner!

Anyhow, the install is almost complete (need to screw in a bracket to keep the batteries secure, figure out how to protect the exposed battery terminals, and generally just clean up the wires), but it has been up and running for a couple days at home now, and not a single problem.

A couple of upgrades I'm thinking about but first, I just want to go camping!

• The stock 300W solar panel may need an upgrade, as the time to charge these batteries seems like it's going to be quite long
• I might try to figure out how to get more of the 110 outlets powered by the battery system, but I believe that will take a lot of work with the power panel / converter and while I'm comfortable with DC, AC is not exactly my wheelhouse (I think I saw a thread on this somewhere . . .)

A sincere thanks to everyone on this forum, I would not have been able to do it without the inspiration, guidance and knowledge.

Here it is, in the storage compartment of the 21G:

[acoleman43]

bbinge Excellent! Nice work. Now all that's left is to go out and use it. You have so many beautiful places to go in your area.

About the EG4 batteries, my batteries are just the cells Signature Solar uses for their EG4 batteries. They have been flawless for over a year and well over 10,000 miles of travelling from Idaho, to Nevado, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Utah, Louisianna, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Vermont, Delaware, West Virginia, North Carolian, South Carolina...well you get the idea. Seem to be solid. Good choice.

To help protect the battery terminals you might consider making a box around your batteries, or a wall against your batteries. This will protect all the exposed wires/equipment from anything you want to throw in there. It doesn't need to be anything fancy.