Not only do we build campers here at Orange Campers, we also offer modifications and upgrades as well. One increasingly popular upgrade our clients are opting for is adding a lithium battery to their ‘van.
Let’s dive a little deeper into why a lithium battery might be the right choice for you and your ‘van and what the installation process is like…
Why install a lithium battery into your campervan?
Your battery in your campervan powers everything electric – so anything you want to plug in, like your laptop or hair dryer, plus the fridge and the lights, etc.
A traditional leisure battery, which you’ll find in most campervans, works like a car battery, where after the first charge, it can never go back up to 100% again.
A huge benefit to installing a lithium battery is it allows you to go ‘off-grid’. This means you don’t need to worry about hooking up at campsites any longer! You can park up literally anywhere and have power – pretty amazing, right?!
It used to be that ‘off-gridding’ meant slumming it a little and needing to ration your power – but thankfully, the tech has much improved, and we’re now at the point where you can’t even tell the difference!
A lithium battery is also much lighter and takes up less space while tripling battery life and your off-grid time.
A lithium battery just makes everything that much more enjoyable because you don't need to worry about how long the fridge is going to run or running out of power!
Watch Richard explain why lithium batteries are better for your campervan, how the ones that we install work, and show you the app.
How powerful are lithium batteries?
Now, the thing with lead acid batteries is that although they might be a hundred amp battery, you cannot use 100 amps!
Whereas with a lithium battery, you can virtually use what it says is on the tin.
A lead acid battery will never fully charge back to a 100% after the first charge. You also can't fully drain it without damaging the battery either – there’s a limited window within that battery life.
But, with a lithium battery, you've got a hundred amps to play with, and you can divide that a hundred amps by whatever equipment you're using.
The fridge is the biggest draw – it can sometimes pull four or five amps an hour on a hot day.
Once you divide all your items, by dividing by a hundred, that'll give you your runtime of all your appliances – or how long your batteries are going to last – which is not that long when you divide it by 24 hours in a day.
Realistically, you could be pulling 20 amps an hour in total, which won't run very long, and that's why you normally need a hookup to keep you fully powered.
However, lithium gives you a much greater use of battery power. With a recent upgrade, we've installed a 280-amp lithium battery, and all that power is usable and accessible.
Having the use of all your amps and being independent of hookups are already very good reasons to invest in a lithium battery!
However, one more benefit to consider is that a lithium battery is much lighter and smaller than a traditional battery.
For example, to achieve 280 amps from a traditional battery, you'd need three big lead acid batteries that weigh a ton, whereas lithium is much lighter – and very compact! We've installed a 280 amp lithium battery in the same space as where two lead acid batteries have been stored!
How does a lithium battery work?
The lithium batteries are all self-contained. We use Victron controllers, which has a handy app connected to it! So you go into your Victron Connect app, and it can show you all your devices in the ‘van.
Your Smart Shunt (which is an app-based device extra we offer) will work out all your power, tell you what your run time is, and show you exactly how much power you're drawing at any one time. It can tell you how much your battery is charged at the tap of a button!
In contrast, it's very hard to measure a lead acid battery on a campervan. Vehicle batteries are different, but for campervan batteries, it is very hard to get an accurate percentage of what your battery is charged.
But lithium has its own Battery Management System (BMS) in there, and it tells you exactly what percentage your battery is charged at. We can input those settings into a Smart Shunt, and that tells us exactly what state of charge we're at.
Lithium sits much higher than lead acid batteries. So it's quite natural to sit at 13 volts, and it will sit virtually all the way down while it's depleting. Meanwhile, lead acid batteries can drop quite happily to 11 volts, and then appliances will start failing when they get too low.
Whereas the good thing about a lithium battery is that it stays at a high usable voltage all the way through to depletion. The app is very useful, with great information such as how much time and power remains, history and trends tracking too,
While you’re driving, we've got the DC to DC charger with a nice big 30 amp charger on them. So when driving, you can generate more power!
We also include a kill switch as well, so you can isolate that lithium battery. This is very important if anything were to happen; you've got the controller to isolate and secure it and make it nice and safe.
Watch Richard as he shows us round a new lithium and solar upgrade we have just put on another customers 'van!
What is the price of our lithium battery installation?
While installing a lithium battery isn’t a cheap option, it has a lot of pros, as we discussed above, and it makes for a great improvement to your overall campervan experience.
For our Trouvaille Actif campervans, installing an additional lithium battery costs £999.
For our Trouvaille Classique SWB campervans and the newer Trouvaille Classique MWB campervans, we offer a couple of options: A 100ah lithium battery upgrade is £1790 (£1950 retro fit) and a 280ah lithium battery upgrade is £2450 (£2650 retro fit).
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