Hi Michael,

I have a 400W digital inverter in my bus that reports the wattage
load as its running. Your 144W LCD seems very thirsty. I have a cheap
13" CRT TV that only pulls 57 Watts. The XBox we use for DVD's is
rated to pull 2 amps but in real usage only pulls 110-120W.

I have seen my son play non-stop off the deep-cycle auxiliary battery
for several hours at a time without the inverter running out of
juice. YMMV.

Happy Trails,

Greg Potts
1973/74/77/79 Westfakia "Bob The Tomato
www.pottsfamily.ca
www.busesofthecorn.com

On 3-Mar-07, at 2:26 PM, Michael Elliott wrote:

> Hi Dennis, that's right. For this exercise I was looking at monitor
> power consumption only.  I know that our Philips DVD player likes
> about
> 2.5A when running, so I'm figuring another 5Ah for the player
> itself for
> a 2-hour movie.
>
> Mark's 17'' 12V monitor makes my 17'' 120V monitor look like a total
> power hog. Mine is rated at 1.2A @ 120V which is 144W, while his is
> rated at 4.2A @ 12V which is closer to 50W. For a 2-hour movie, his
> monitor would only need a relatively miserly 8.4Ah
>
> Player + monitor would be about 14Ah for a 2 hour flick. With our
> Group
> 27 battery topped off, that's not out of the question as long as we
> are
> sure we'll have charging power (either engine or sun) the following
> day.
>
> Where do you folks camp where you receive TV signals? I can't think of
> any nice camping area in SoCal where one would expect to be within
> range
> of a TV transmission tower.
>
> --
> Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott
> 71 Type 2: the Wonderbus
> 84 Westfalia: Mellow Yellow ("The Electrical Banana")
> 74 Utility Trailer. Ladybug Trailer, Inc., San Juan Capistrano
> KG6RCR
>
>
>
> dhaynes@optonline.net typed:
>> Don't forget, you will still need to power up the DVD player to watch
>> the DVD on the monitor.
>>
>> So an Optima will have trouble playing one movie.
>>
>> Dennis