Possible to cool roof top tent with EcoFlow Wave Portable Air Conditioner? | 4WDTalk - Overlanding and offroad Forum
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Possible to cool roof top tent with EcoFlow Wave Portable Air Conditioner?

Flatlander

Flatlander

Active member
As my other post noted, we are planning for a summer camping season. I just found this thing: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/wave-portable-air-conditioner-extra-battery-bundle

So a few questions:

1. They say you can run this for 3 hours. Is that on high, medium or low?
2. This thing is 4000 BTU, will that cool down a roof top tent that basically has nearly no R value?
3. If you have one of their other battery packs, like their 3.6kW unit, will that be enough to run through the night?

Can you run two of their 400W solar panels into this and have a surplus of power? meaning you could run the AC during the day, and still manage to charge the battery?
 
I was looking at those also. I don't anyone who has one so i cant comment on how long or what settings.
What I can tell you is temperature and humidity have a big effect on AC. You can calculate the btu required to cool the tent then turn that directly into watts. What the formula wont factor is outside temp and humidity. I don't know that formula. I am a little skeptical with the "Runs 3 hours on high" though. Their site is a bit confusing with the specs but it looks like at max, it uses 1200 watts per hour. So 3.5 (ish) hours on battery on high. That probably turns into 6 ish hours on low.
Again Humidity and ambient temp.
You would most likely want close to 2kw of solar to run it all day and charge the battery. That's if you had to run it on high.

Guessing it's probably accurate with low humidity and only dropping inside temp 25 degrees. If its 100 out, that's not bad. The lack of insulation kinda makes those numbers not really work. My teardrop trailer would most likely be ideal.
Unfortunately all the reviews are on units used in a home. See if you can find reviews with users camping. If your lucky they will post what state their in.
 
Exactly! That's what I felt walking from their site, many questions not answered. So if I have two 100amp hour batteries in my set up, how long could that run something like this? Seeing something like this runs on DC energy I could circumvent the inverter. Actually any idea how many watts a 100amp hour battery equals to?
 
Read this Review, these guys compare the unit to another brand. They also take it out to 110 weather and stick it in a large tent. They comment on the power requirements for charging the battery. It seems the addon battery can not be charged without it being attached to the unit. If you bought two you couldn't charge one while the other was used. It would extend the run time though. In a RTT, you probably could run it on a lower setting. The tent they tested it in was big.

They also stated, the delta pro battery bank is designed to directly run the unit giving it 3-4 times longer runtime.

Clip from the review.
3,600Wh with the Delta Pro or its DP Add-On Battery. The latter would allow the Wave to run 3-4 times as long on a single charge… up to 32 hours in Eco or 12 hours in AC-only.
Eco mode means fan only.

I found their comments on a intake air filter interesting. You pay extra and its two sided taped to the side of the housing.

This is the only what I call honest review I saw. The rest seemed to skate around any power issues. Most likely its because they were given something to review but didn't understand the actual physics behind it. In other words lets give these to non experts to review.
 
Did you look at the size of that he was cooling? That's a big tent, so something like this in a RTT will work much better. So if you had a generator running that produced 2000W for example you would be able to run this thing and have a surplus of power?

Wait, what was the wattage this thing pulled?
 
I think he had an 8 person tent. That means you wont have to set it as high. Also look into the other unit he was comparing it to. Smaller and less draw.
The only negative is if you have two batteries. They have to be charged while on the machine but you can plug an external battery to it and run it while charging.
 
smritte said:
I think he had an 8 person tent. That means you wont have to set it as high. Also look into the other unit he was comparing it to. Smaller and less draw.
The only negative is if you have two batteries. They have to be charged while on the machine but you can plug an external battery to it and run it while charging.
Click to expand...
You talking about the ZeroBreeze? If so, isn't that literally have the BTU size?
 
I'm on the fence about the ZeroBreeze, not sure if something like that is going to be able to keep something cool during warmer summer nights.
 
Well you have a few months to figure things out before it starts getting hot! Last year was horrible for most. Hoping a cooler summer, but know we won't likely get. Let me know how that works out. We might need to cave in ourselves.
 
I was just reading that the Eco Flow has a max solar charge input of only 200W. Kind of expected more considering this thing is pulling down ~500W.
 
Just watched this on the Zero Breeze 2, seems like that will work, but you need dual batteries and ability to charge it while it's running.

 
Interesting, I'm watching videos now on that eco flow wave. Eco flow makes some good batteries, wondering if that AC unit is as good.
 
I've been watching a number of reviews and the general consensus with cooling a rooftop tent is there is nearly no R value with the walls of the tent. So you just need more cool air to overpower all that air that is escaping.
 
I'll chime in on this one as well. We had been looking at the Ecoflow Wave and nearly sold on it, but the semi deal breaker for us was that the max solar input was only 200W. Considering this thing runs at over 500W, that wasn't going to work. Now the work around to this is that you could have a big ass battery that has your 500W+ solar dumped into it, then have the Wave plugged into that. Therefor you can run throughout the day, and have enough to make it through the night. My wife has made it clear that we need to have AC figured out this summer if she is going to come along. So Ecoflow has that Delta unit that goes up to crazy big storage, that's the option we are considering.
 
If you are concerned about power, and while the below video is a horrible video as the guy repeats himself a few times and conducts a AC test in already cooler environment, it does show that the Bouge RV AC unit pulling down 160W to run at 61 degrees. That's pretty awesome. From my research this look like a slightly larger unit than the Zero Breeze, but still smaller than the Ecoflow wave.

 
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