Help with a 12v system in a trailer

[Mad Manny]

A mate of mine (& former 4x4'er & Club member) asked me an interesting question yesterday.
Can anyone help with an answer?

Here is the question....
I have a weird request a client of mine is wanting to modernise the ICE cream/coffee van, we want to put two soft serve (4 flavours), and two slushy machines into a van and a coffee machine and go from festival to festival with the offering.
Our thinking was that we could put a couple of solar panels on the roof and LiFePo4 batteries and also get a bigger alternator and run the soft serve machine and slush machines and coffee machine and a couple of LED lights,
I am waiting for the exact power specs of the machines from the supplier.
Do you think this is possible ?
would you know someone to install this?

[grips]

Everything is possible depending how deep your pockets are. Difficult to make calculations as one does not know what the power requirements are.

Quick look at Google shows that those big Coffee machines are around 3000w resulting 13Amp power draw. Adding the other stuff would take you to around 20Amp. This will require a minimum 5kW inverter. The full load of 20A will give you 1 hour with 5kW. Hope it helps.

[Mad Manny]

Sounds like his best & cheapest option in a small Gennie...
The panels, LiFePo batteries, Inverter & wiring is going to run him R30k or R40k

[Wave]

Yip, I would suggest the same, good quality gennie, much easier too

[PsyPhin]

As best and average I can google for power consumption, can vary quite a lot but even at half of all quoted numbers, I do not see this working out.

Slushy machine constant 1000w
Ice Cream machine 3 flavour 1800w
Large coffee machine 3000w

So will need likely a 8Kw inverter ~R25k
1x 5kw battery for every hour you want to use the system if you are using all the machines, ~R28k each

Solar panels wont work as a 2m x 1m panel ~R4k each
can only really produce 550w in full sun these days and you cant whip out 10x of them to keep going

Or just a 7.5kw generator for R16k
https://www.builders.co.za/Tools-%26-Pr ... r4EALw_wcB

[Erin]

In a previous life, I was involved in organising and co-ordinating a large number of vendors for an annual event. All those who required electricity would plug into the (somewhat unreliable) supply that we were able to provide, or use their own generators. Those with generators were much happier than those without when the power supply inevitably failed.