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I wanted a way to monitor my electricity consumption and battery level but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on expensive battery monitors either. I didn’t need anything sophisticated. Just something good enough to give me a general idea of tracking my electricity usage and how much I had left.
I found this cheap Aili Battery Monitor on Amazon.
It is the kind that has the Hall Effect Sensor, which is basically a ring that goes around your battery’s positive wire and it measures the magnetic field to determine how much electricity is flowing through the wire. I like this idea because I don’t need to cut any existing wires or install a shunt, like a regular battery monitor. Plus it can be removed later without leaving a trace.
How accurate it is compared to a shunt based monitor, I don’t really know. According to some reports, it is supposed to be quite accurate, but I also read a lot of contradicting opinions on the Internet. In the end, I don’t really care as I am not really looking for the best of the best anyway.
I went ahead and ordered it. There wasn’t really a good place for it in my RV, so I also got a plastic black box and cut a rectangular hole in the cover, just big enough to fit this monitor. I set it up under the master bed in the front of the RV. I also added a switch so I can turn off the monitor, although ever since I installed it, I have never turned it off. It barely draws any electricity and on my 2 6V 225Ah batteries, it lasts a long time.
My only challenge with this device were the very flimsy wires, which made it a bit of a delicate process to wire it all together, but in the end, this monitor seems to work well. I did have to extend the wires of this device to get to my batteries, which are on the outside of the RV. All I had to do was follow some existing wires through a hole in the floor and then seal it up again after.
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