Hello everyone! It's been a long while since I've been on the board, but now I have a dilemma that I think only the Otherpower gurus can help with.
Since my last visits to this board, I had purchased land to build my off-grid home. But before building that home, I required an (off-grid) base of operations. That came in the form of a badly water-damaged travel trailer that I have rebuilt and modified for 4-seasons use. In the course of reconstructing just about every possible thing, I decided to replace all the light fixtures, with their power hungry #921 style bulbs. (18w/bulb) I installed 120v fixtures, simply wired to the 12v, and installed a mix of 12v medium base LED and CFL lamps throughout, with the CFLs doing the major portion of the lumens production.
All was working good, as I now manage to still produce 96% of the total lumens of the original lighting, while slashing power consumption by 69%. The problem came when I decided to hook up to 120v "park power" to run the furnace and not suck the battery down. The trailer has a built in electrical distribution panel for both 120v and a charger/12v distribution bank. All the CFLs burned out in about 2 seconds when I applied power to the rig. I'm assuming the increased voltage from the charger was the culprit. I haven't yet checked the actual voltage at the light sockets to see what it is, but I'm going to gamble a guess it will be something like 14.0~14.5 volts. (just going by the sound of the fan speed increase of the furnace blower) All the LED lighting continues to work flawlessly. (not entirely surprising, as I believe most are rated 10~30 VDC)
Now, maybe the solution is as simple as using a different (more expensive?) brand CFL. What I had was Feit Electric brand. I heard the Camco brand is complete junk. If anyone found CFLs with a more tolerable voltage range, irregardless of price, please let me know. If not, I was kicking around installing individual voltage regulators in each fixture, but I haven't found one that would suit my purpose. The problem I'm having is finding a regulator that has a steady output of 12 volt when the input is 12 or more. What I found will work OK if the input voltage is 14.5, but the output drops too low when the input is just 12.5
I know what some of you are thinking. Why worry about park power, when I'll be off-grid anyhow. My concern comes when the solar array is charging the battery bank, likely increasing voltage throughout the rig. Also, the possibility of running a generator to recharge the batteries for those cloudy/stormy days.
Anyhow, if you got this far, thanks for reading through my ramblings! My fingers are crossed someone might have a solution!