Is it "easy" to move the freshwater tank?

I searched the forums to see if anyone has attempted to move the freshwater tank. I did not yield any threads/posts addressing this possibility.

I am curious. Would it be "difficult" to move the freshwater tank rearward by 2-4 inches? I am not sure how it is mounted to the floor but it appears to have something to do with a small piece of box beam aluminum or some such. The one picture I have of the area does not show the drain hole so perhaps an additional drain hole would have to be made.

My reason for asking is I am going to be installing my inverter this week, likely Tuesday. There are two locations under consideration on the forward wall: either on the port side settee forward of the water tank or on the starboard side.

There is already a few inches of space in front of the water tank. If I moved the water tank farther back, I could create enough room to accommodate the inverter and some air gap for ventilation purposes. I recognize that relocating the water tank is a headache but it would provide two benefits: 1) it would put the inverter in an equipment locker with water pump/accumulator, solar controller, and water tank. (no one but me is ever going to be poking around in this compartment although I suppose one could imagine some horror stories involving mixing water with AC). 2) routing romex on the port side of the TM is very simple.

If I put the inverter on the starboard side, it creates two headaches: 1) I have to route an additional romex cable underneath TM to port side if I want to do anything elegant with respect to switching between shore/inverter power. I presume that to do that job correctly entails peeling back part of the floor skin to reveal the cable tray the existing romex is routed in. 2) the starboard side settee is used for frequent storage by family so I would need to create some form of protection around the inverter to keep wife from stacking pillows or something over the vent holes or dropping something across the terminal posts.

I am currently thinking about going the easy way out from a wiring perspective: install inverter on starboard side and "permanently" disconnect AC outlets from shore power instead of routing a new parallel run of romex from starboard to port. (AC would then only be available via the inverter but there would be no possibility of backfeeding inverter with shore power).

However, if I could move the water tank rearward by 2-4 inches or so, it would really make a robust inverter install a lot easier as I could use auto transfer switches or a simple manual DPDT switch or whatever.

Thoughts?

Thoughts?

WOW, Sounds like you are creating a lot more work for yourself than necessary. First I’d never take the shore power circuit out of the system. The inverter is not near as efficient and I don’t know of a charger that could even come close to keeping up with the amp drain a 2000w inverter could put on the batteries. At 1000w you’d be draining over 80 amps from the batteries, maybe ok to brew a pot of coffee or something but it would run your batteries down in a hurry if used all the time. Also, the inverter should be located as close to batteries as possible and even then I’d connect it to the batteries using #1 battery cables to carry the amps with out worrying about voltage drop. Then you could run the romex to the TM’s converter and use a DPDT switch to switch between shore power and inverter. I’m no expert in this area so this is just my way of thinking. I’m sure Bill or someone with more knowledge will jump in with better ideas.

Ed

Originally Posted by Digger

WOW, Sounds like you are creating a lot more work for yourself than necessary. First I’d never take the shore power circuit out of the system. The inverter is not near as efficient and I don’t know of a charger that could even come close to keeping up with the amp drain a 2000w inverter could put on the batteries. At 1000w you’d be draining over 80 amps from the batteries, maybe ok to brew a pot of coffee or something but it would run your batteries down in a hurry if used all the time. Also, the inverter should be located as close to batteries as possible and even then I’d connect it to the batteries using #1 battery cables to carry the amps with out worrying about voltage drop. Then you could run the romex to the TM’s converter and use a DPDT switch to switch between shore power and inverter. I’m no expert in this area so this is just my way of thinking. I’m sure Bill or someone with more knowledge will jump in with better ideas.

Ed

A few extra pieces of data in response to your response.

The load of the inverter when on and with no AC load being driven is <800mA. I have a convenient remote power switch that can turn the the inverter off when AC power is not needed.

I am aware of inverter inefficiencies and am not humoring the hope that a converter would offset a 1000-2000w load.

I am using 4/0 AWG cables and the length will likely be in the 3 feet range once I trim to final dimension. The inverter location on the forward wall in the settees is the closest physical location to my tongue mounted batteries that I can muster short of mounting the inverter externally.

My desire to route the romex through a DPDT switch is precisely why the thread was launched. Romex routing is easy from the port side, a pain from the starboard side.

[MudDog]

I would think running off the inverter all of the time for A/C power would likely reduce the life of the batteries and the inverter.

My inverter is installed on the curb side, front wall and relies on manually turning off the breaker on the converter, connecting a twist lock cable into a receptacle tied to the outlets via the external outlet box in the stoarge compartment and turning the inverter on via remote switch.

I drilled a couple of large holes in the floor for the 1/0 battery cables and used some short lengths of plastic conduit as a sleeve and sprayed expanding foam to seal the gaps.

It appears if you drilled another hole at about the spot I did for the battery cables, you could use a 1/2 plastic electrical conduit for the romex to run across the bottom of the TM. There are frame cut-outs on both sides for the front torsion bars.

On my TM it appears there is plenty of room for a piece of conduit at the front of the torsion bar cut-outs. You could have a short piece of vertical conduit with an elbow to take you down thru the floor where the inverter is installed, then a longer piece to go across and then another elbow and vertical piece to get you into the street side storage compartment and the romex would be protected from the elements all the way across.

The inverter is in. I am really happy with how the 4/0 cable install worked out. I might do some trimming on the battery box covers to make them fit a bit better around those big cables but those are small clean up details. Glad the hard part of the job is over.

I am not yet in final AC configuration right now because I will be installing a manual DPDT switch at some point. I also haven't mounted the remote power panel under the sink but the hard part is basically done. I don't have the time to finish things right now because I need to pack this rig up tonight so I can drive to Pt. Mugu right after work tomorrow. (We decided to go a day early so I lost some work time)

I went the easy way out and installed the inverter under the curb side settee. Right now I am just keeping the breaker off so that I energize the outlets from two different sources. In the interest of simplicity I am not going to run a parallel length of romex from curb side to port side. The inverter and the convenience outdoor outlets will not be independent of each other (unless I physically unplug the inverter). It should work great.

The only AC load it has had other than a circuit tester so far has been the shop vac but it handled that well.