EuroVan camper aux battery (full camper, not realta)

[Mittens]

good morning -

I searched here on the Samba and Google but I'm coming up with two different answers in regards to Aux Battery / House Battery / whatever it's officially labeled

one thing says its under the driver's seat, one says its under bed on the right side. so where is it? and IF it's under the bed, how big can I go physically? I know under the seat it's essentially another cranking battery.

secondly, what would I need to do to replace the inverter / charger / etc to run the Eurovan solely from the battery (sometimes with the help of Solar if I cant plug it in) since there's a few places I want to camp that MAY not have a pedestal close enough or ""rustic""


to answer the questions, ideally its gonna be my laptop, iPhone and a hotspot and when my kids are with me, their iPads. there might a small TV so I can catch local channels / stream stuff for them but camping is supposed to be 'lets go do shit, guys' and sometimes there's gonna be a night where its like ' F it, Im tired'

[Abscate]

Weekender under driver seat

Camper under bed

You can get an LED TV which will draw 30 watts so about 10 hours of viewing time will be fine, computer about the same
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[Mittens]

[Abscate]

Honorary dudette. Up until Covid I was a Captain in eight seas of estrogen ranging from age 22-90. Now my ship is estrogen free but still laden with the aftermath.
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[steve2sloth]

I've also got the Eurovan Camper and I like to use lots of battery when I'm off the grid, so I upgraded the house battery by following this blog (https://1705.net/6-volt-battery-setup/) though I did mine a little differently because I put in one big 200ah 12v battery instead of two smaller 6v batteries. Here's my post about it: https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=735243 . There's lots of ways to do solar so do as you please but the two best things that I did was to put in the big house battery and paired it with a battery monitor. With the monitor I know EXACTLY how much battery I have left, how much I'm charging, and how fast I'm draining. The solar chargers and voltage meters are only a guess and you'll see wildly different numbers while your solar is plugged in and filling up. Good luck!

[Mittens]

[MrPulldown]

A group 31 is the largest battery you can fit in the battery box. I bought this one. Thought about a fancy Li unit but for the price this can't be beat.
https://www.oreillyauto.com/detail/c/marine/batter...sbb/31dcmj

for my 110v devices I typically run a small inverter like this.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Inverter-Converter-Ch...&psc=1

I have seen some people wire in an inverter so that the 110 plugs in the camper will auto switch from inverter when on battery to shore power when plugged in. Look kind of complicated.

One thing to note is that most laptops will take 110 AC and convert it to 5-10 volts DC. That is what the black box along the charging cable that gets warm does. It is horribly inefficient to take DC invert to AC just to convert back to DC. Instead you should get a DC charging cable.

https://www.amazon.com/USB-C-Laptop-Charger-Power-...amp;sr=8-3
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2002 EVC

[Mittens]

[Mittens]

[steve2sloth]