HymerVan

Yes and alarm and a tracker will draw current from the battery to which they are connected. Apparently fitting practice varies but I think both devices are most likely to be fitted to the vehicle battery rather than the habitation battery. You do seem to have a good setup and compared to a compressor fridge the current draw will be very small. The quality and setup of your solar controller is an issue. Ideally it should have the ability to give a little current to the vehicle battery if needed. I think your tracker will be permanently switched on. Obviously your alarm may or may not be armed but why would you not arm it ? It may be a condition of your insurance that you arm it AND it seems possible that failing to set may breach the more general policy condition to take reasonable care etc. You Tracker may have the capacity to sent you reports on the relevant battery voltage. Mine certainly does and this enables you to head off a problem if you see the voltage dropping too much in the dead of winter.

Hi Rachel I am not sure if buying a Hymer Van 522 at Earls Court in November 2005 counts as "recent" but the following "thoughts" may be of interest:- As regards a trade in the dealer will be agreeing a price without seeing your vehicle and he will probably price it subject to seeing it (with assumptions that it is A1 probably). So there is scope for the trade in price to be pared down when the vehicle is seen/handed over. If the vehicle is not in stock there may be slippage on the delivery date and/or the trade in vehicle's value may change with time, use or mileage. The purchase documents should make it clear how this will be dealt with. My above Hymer Van was one of the very first to be imported into the UK and I was able to negotiate what I thought was a very good deal. The nominal trade in value was very low so there must have been a big discount built into the bottom line. We walked round Earls Court for several hours before returning to negotiate but the market and availability is probably different now but I would counsel readers to keep a calm head and not get carried away !

Sorry should have read 2021

A word in favour of autonomous braking systems. I have a 2018 Audi Q2 (think golf sized SUV). In 2021 I was driving in a relatively narrow urban street with cars parked on each side and quite slowly perhaps 20-25 mph. Suddenly the car performed a full blown emergency stop, quickly enough to prevent striking a car door and its passengers leg opened directly into my path on the nearside. I initially rationalised that I had performed a remarkably quick stop by reflex action but soon realised that the car had begun to brake before I joined in. So the system worked and saved the day. The "domestic" between the driver and his passenger was pretty dramatic though. (Edited to correct year)

If you get a Tracker I would get one with S5 and immobilisation features

Just on the subject of chatbots and chats. It does seem to me that there is a trend towards making communication with customers more difficult or at least on the terms and by the narrow channels dictated by the provider. It seems to me ironical that some of the companies most difficult to contact are communications companies ! I think many organisations use a bot i.e. a computer program to filter, triage if you will, enquiries and that part of the system may deal with a portion of enquiries by giving standard answers and/or directing to internet resources. However the bot may then direct the customer to a real living person, who may in turn escalate the query to a specialist. The layer(s) with a real person are still a chat but it will be a more focussed chat and may even produce an acceptable answer. I have recently had this experience with my internet service provider who would only offer full fibre solutions at renewal (something incidentally which I believe will become more widespread/the norm as BT/Openreach pursue the policy of dumping their traditional copper wire network). Ultimately my query was dealt with in a technically acceptable manner even though they wouldn't do what I wanted and I have been bounced into full fibre. The main problem though is that the chat is very slow, presumably because the chat operator is dealing with a number of chats simultaneously. As mentioned the ability to download a transcript is valuable. So my view is that if a chat is the only option then give it a go and persevere. My resolution as above took over an hour. Speaking directly with the right person would have taken 5 minutes ! If you are in a chat you can politely ask the person if they are a real living person or ask them something like how is the weather where you are located ? In issues with a legal aspect don't forget that you can still write to companies using "snail mail" and here recorded delivery can be useful.

Cheap as Chips ? Have you actually bough chips lately ? 😀

Sadly I have to agree with Grumpyman. The infrastructure just hasn't been (and possibly cannot be) made to cope with the number of tourists. It's made worse by promotion of the belief that you can (in a vehicle) wild camp at will which is not and never has been the legal position. Have seen a convoy of 25 sequentially stickered Italian Campervans set off line astern you can imagine the havoc they would have caused on single track roads, and scarcely a hired van without duck tape on the mirrors.

Thanks very much for this. Actually I wondered if jump start advice would be on your "aandn" website and I did look for it but managed to have missed it. There is no ambiguity or lack of clarity in your advice so I will be making special efforts to avoid needing a jump start.

Thanks for the contributions thus far. Derek has in his last post summarised my question pretty well. Based on the advice from Allan at a and n the "normal" procedure when jump starting carries a (significant) risk that the started vehicles alternator will deliver enough current to destroy the startee vehicles battery. I don't think the mode of jump starting, be it another car, a slave battery or a jump starting battery pack makes a difference because its what happens after the startup that I was concerned about. I fully get it that breakdown service won't want to hang about to protect the old battery they will be wanting to get on to their next job and when the RAC attended my daughters almost new Nissan they jump started with a battery pack after testing her battery and saying that it was borderline. The battery failed completely the next week and Nissan replaced it under warranty. At present I carry serious heavy duty jump leads in the van and they have rescued a few other people but I have only used them on my own van once. They take significant space and payload which got me to thinking that a suitable Li-ion battery pack might work as well but not be as bulky. It may be that the answer is that there is little option but to jump start and take the risk of the alternator "frying" the battery but given Alan's advice I was exploring whether there was any way of reducing the risk.

Earlier this year I started a thread about expected vehicle battery life in the course of which Allan from A & N Caravan services stressed the dangers of jump starting a flat battery insofar as the extremely high charging current output from newer alternators could destroy the battery. I am not challenging that advice but wondering if there is a way round it. If I understood the position correctly the battery of the restarted vehicle is still pretty flat because it is the slave battery which has done the work and consequently the vehicle battery seeks to take and the modern alternator has capacity to deliver a very high current to the battery, so high in fact that it can destroy the battery. September 2017 MMM has an article "Jump Start a Motorhome" including using Li-ion battery packs. That lead me to thinking that irrespective of how the engine is restarted the risk of "blowing" the battery is the same because the discharged condition of the vehicle battery is the same. Would it be possible to connect the Li-ion battery pack to the battery for a period of time to allow the vehicle battery to draw current sufficient to "recover" to a point where it is likely to draw less charging current and consequently reduce or eliminate the risk of post startup damage ? if so how long might that be for a typically "flat" battery. If such a procedure could work it could be done with jump leads as well but in many situations the battery pack could be connected for say an hour without difficulty whereas for traffic or other reasons doing that with jump leads might be impracticable.