Originally Posted by
Jon Wehrenberg
JDUB, Has it ever occurred to you that some of us want coaches that look like bordellos and have a little decorative flair, than rather austere coaches that have the ambiance of a prison cafeteria?
Ed, Undoubtedly eliminating the OTR, and then explaining it by saying it saves weight seems just a little questionable. But what do I know. The four extra batteries are gong to weigh around 640 pounds. I would guess two more inverters are going add another 80, and with the heavy copper cables I would guess 20 more. If I were to guess the Prevost OTR system components would not weigh much more if at all.
But....I can understand why OTR doesn't make sense. All of our OTR air flow in a conversion has to be balanced and directed properly to avoid hot and cold spots. Typically it is ducted to flow up across the windows, and is vented in various places across the front for the driver and passenger. If 3/4 of the coach is taken up with slides and ducting cannot be feasible for OTR in the slide areas it just about limits OTR as being practical unless it is ducted up and across the ceiling, something that may bring about other issues.
I just hope the AC units are not Cruise Airs because their performance when sucking heated air from the road surface is just plain lousy.
But to run four AC units from inverters raises another concern. At 24 volts each AC unit will pull around 65 amps. The total is 260 amps if all four are running. So going down the road it is likely that with other loads the house batteries will actually be discharging assuming the bus has a 270 amp alternator. If it has dual alternators that issue goes away, but then the weight argument about OTR looms again. Those big alternators are about 120 pounds.
With three and possibly four slides the converters, all of them, not just Liberty have some serious design challenges, weight being the first consideration, but having appropriate systems to replace OTR certainly comes into play. As floor space increases so does the number of AC units really needed to handle the loads.