Hi,
This has been a really interesting thread to me because I'm trying to decide on some sort of AC for the van. But, I don't want to get into needing shore power whenever I need the AC.
Our traveling is nearly always in the west, and if we did go down to the gulf or Florida it would be in the winter when no AC is probably needed. So, mostly dry conditions.
I'm still on the fence about using some type of evaporative cooler or something like a 5K BTU/hr window AC adapted to the van.
I've got a roll around evaporative cooler that we use for the house that does a good job for the few days of hot weather we get in Bozeman each summer. We have a couple days of 90F coming up, and I'm going to put it in the van in full sun and see what it does. The plan would be to put this between the driver and passenger seats with the cab windows and back windows all open some (as evap coolers like).
The evap cooler takes up some space and we would only take it along on hot trips, which would not be common for us. Its this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-CO...&sr=8-7&keywords=honeywell+evaporative+cooler
The one we have in hand runs on 175 watts, and with 95% inverter efic, this would be 16 amps, and adding 4 amps for other stuff would put us at 20 amps with AC running. So, going down to 20% SOC on our 220 AH batteries, we could get 9 hrs of night use. During the day the solar would keep with the load, and normally we would be driving and not even running the evap AC. So, that seems workable?
There are other evap coolers with less capacity that use much less than 175 watts (eg 50 watts), and this would also be a possibility if our large cooler seems like too much capacity. With a 50 watt cooler, we could go forever on batteries and solar.
https://www.sylvane.com/honeywell-cs071ae-evaporative-cooler.html
I'll report on how the test comes out.
Other possibility is to uses a 5 or 6K BTU/hr window AC unit. I've looked at some of the ways people have done this (Wbullvent, Chance, and Sonicsix plus some others on YouTube etc). The ones that actually replace (say) a back window seem likely to give the best performance, but I don't like the idea of the window mount. SonicSix's setup
http://rvroadtrip.us/library/van_airconditioner.php seems like the most likely to give the full cooling performance of the window AC as it has a decent condenser cooling air input area, and a large condenser cooling exhaust area?? But he says that is did not cool well enough for him and he went to a larger portable unit -- I think he is in Alabama, so tough area for cooling.
Chance, sounds like yours is working well -- would you say its good or 90 or 95F dry conditions?
My rough calcs say that in the shade, my insulated van with the Reflectex plugs in the windows, and 95F ambient, the heat loss is 1600 BTU/hr plus 1500 BTU/hr gain from two people, dog, ... -- so, about 3000 BTU/hr. So, looks like a 5 or 6K unit would do it, but not with a lot of margin??
With my current battery setup, I'd only be able to get about 5 hrs, but that might be enough, or I could go to 4 golf cart batteries.
I'd appreciate any thoughts, advice, suggestions on which way we should go?
Thanks -- Gary