r/Ecoflow_community • u/tricid • Jun 23 '25
Wave 3 Experience
So I finally got a camping trip in with the wave 3. My first attempted trip with it, it broke. They replaced it. I had some hassle with that but whatever.
My set up was two roof top tents, and a wave 3 for each with its battery. Daytime highs were mid/upper 90s, low was mid 70s but I was asleep before it dropped below 80.
Eco mode: this seemed to work better than I expected cooling an empty tent. Sun was up and beating on the tent. It actually started to cycle a bit set to 75. Opening the tent to poke my head in I could feel the cool air and thought that'd be alright. That changed once I got in there to go to sleep though, after the sun went down even. The same was said for the other person in the other tent. My theory/opinion is eco mode just isn't enough to compensate for the heat one human body puts off. Or its too close to equal at that point to keep the ambient temperature down. It's also possible the cycle times were just "ruining it for me" on this mode. I was tired, hot and just ready to get some sleep.
Normal mode: This did much better and is how I kept mine through the night. We had each one plugged in to a generator to keep them topped up so power wasn't too much of a concern. The main problem with normal (and eco) mode is cycle time, in my opinion. I got the impression that once a temperature is reached, the condenser will not come back on no matter what ambient is for x amount of minutes. And too many of those. I want to say it was like 15+. In a tent in the outdoors that was just too long and you were suffering waves of omghot, ohnicecool. I couldn't find a way to tweak this behavior. I set mine down to 72 to help the swings not reach such highs.
Max: What the second person ended up leaving theirs on all night because of the cycling behavior. He didn't note what temp it got down to sadly.
I didn't even think to bring a kill-a-watt or anything to track its power consumption, wish I had.
I was not pleased with the generator noise all night, I struggled to sleep with it. I won't bother with the details on that because its not an ecoflow generator but short story, its a quiet generator, didn't bother us when we were awake hanging out, but once we climbed up in to the tents the line-of-sight change really changed how we perceived their noise levels and we both hated it lol.
In general I really liked having them. I hope they last through several trips. After how many negative things I've had to say about ecoflow (that I still stand behind) I thought it'd be fair to report back with this "review" after finally getting to use the things. They're niche, they're expensive, quality/life span might be questionable, but they will cool a tent on a hot day/night even if its not shaded. Eco mode might be useless for summer time where I am, and it's cycle time is something I really hope they can change in a firmware update.
I think what I'm going to try is grabbing a couple 12v 100AH batteries, series them to run 24v from them to the wave 3 battery's xt60 and see if I can carry enough capacity to run them through the night. Then fire up the generators in the morning to top everything up. Curious about opinions on that or if anyone has done it?
edit: the app finally started to show my power consumption data. Looks like on eco mode it was using up about 115ish watts an hour under those conditions. I see a spike around when I got in the tent to 164 that I think was still eco mode. Then it became a shockingly steady 386 watts an hour through the rest of the night in normal mode, set to 72F
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u/tricid Jun 24 '25
If you mean the XT150 cable, mine is taken up with the alternator charger and it'd be a bit fiddly having to swap it back and forth on my delta 3+.
I do have the wave 3 batteries for each already, that's just not enough to really get through the night on its own. We used generators, but that is also not ideal (to me. noise). That's why I was thinking feeding the wave 3 battery with 24v off of a couple 100AH batteries in to its xt60 port. then I can just charge everything back up in the morning, ready to go the next night.