Power for enclosed trailer

I recently bought a 24 foot enclosed trailer, and I'm trying to figure out the right way to run power in it. I'm looking to power interior lights, a winch, an air compressor for tires & impact wrench, and a few 110 AC outlets for running miscellaneous small things. One obvious answer is a generator, which is what the previous owner had used, but I'm not sure I want to go that way. They're fairly expensive, noisy, and maintenance-intensive, and I'm pondering the idea of just using a DC battery instead. I don't plan to put air conditioning in the trailer at this point.

The interior of the trailer looks like this:

The loading area lighting are 500w halogens, and the ceiling lights are fluorescent fixtures with 4 T-8 tubes, both AC lights. As you can see the cover on the middle one is falling off from the bumps on the trip home up the 5, and the ballast cover inside the rear light had fallen off inside the fixture too. They seem like the wrong solution for a vibration-prone application like a trailer.

There's a slide-out door for a generator, but it didn't come with the actual generator:

I have a winch for it, which I had previously set up to be fairly simple to bolt to the deck of my open trailer:

It has a battery box sized for a group 27 battery, currently empty. I'm thinking I'll start by putting a deep cycle AGM battery in there, putting the winch in the center cabinet where there's a cutout for it, and hooking the winch to the battery. That'll get me about 90-100 amp-hours, which should be a reasonable start (might want a second battery later?)

Next I'm thinking I'll lose the halogens and fluorescents and replace them with 12v LED lighting. LED floodlights are fairly easy to find (looking at something like this), and I'm sure I can turn up something for the ceiling. An inverter will solve the AC outlets.

For the air compressor, I thought about an AC pancake compressor but that requires a really beefy inverter, and is going to waste a lot of power in the conversion. Then I found DC compressors, which seems like a much better choice. Anyone have experience with these? Something like this.

So how to charge the battery? Well, obviously it'll be hooked to the truck with the trailer cable, and get charged by the alternator. That's only a smallish-gauge wire though, and I don't want the winch to try to suck a hundred amps through it. The wire currently has a fuse on it, but that seems like an undesirable failure mode -- fuse blows, winch runs off trailer battery, I don't notice the fuse is gone, then sometime later the trailer battery is completely dead. Is an auto-reset circuit breaker the right choice here?

I'm also thinking about putting a solar panel on the roof, something about 25 watts? The goal there is to top up the battery when the trailer is parked at my house without needing to plug it in and trip over the extension cord all the time. It looks like a solar charge controller is required for this to avoid cooking the battery.

Does that all seems reasonable? Anything obvious I'm missing?

For charging from the truck, use something like a Xantrex Echo Charge (or other 12v to 12v charger). That'll let you charge at 10 - 15 amps when the truck is running but not drain the truck battery all the time.

Solar panel on the roof plus charge controller is a good idea as well.

A group 27 is kinda small for that use. I'd probably go with a pair of Group 31s (keep in mind, you don't want to drain them below 50%, even with deep cycles). Plus, the compressor, big lights and winch will run much better with bigger batteries (less voltage drop under load).

For the compressor, I've run one of the 3.5 gallon (2 SCFM) pancake units off the 1500w inverter in the Jeep with no issues. I've heard good things about those 12v Puma units as well. I was considering one of those until I realized I already had the inverter and it could run a pancake unit with more output just fine (and the pancake units are much cheaper). There's a 6 gallon (2.6 SCFM) version of the Campbell Hausfeld unit I've got that would work with the same power draw. My 3.5 gal runs an impact fine for short bursts like removing lugs and works very nicely with a 7 gal extra tank added into the mix.

Regardless of AC or DC compressor, I'd probably throw a 2kw inverter in it, just to make sure you've got enough juice for any tools you need to run (like a few minutes with a heat gun, shop vac or something). Pure sine is better, but not required. And some of the big inverters like those have transfer relays and/or built in chargers so you could have things switch over to external power or keep the batteries charged when you're somewhere that has outside power available.

In mine, I ran 0 gauge wires from one of the truck's (diesel) batteries to the back and connected to the trailer battery (lawn mower unit in a box on the tongue) with an Anderson plug. When towing I had it plugged and the batter had enough juice to run my LED lights and phone chargers for a weekend.

I had dual alternators in the truck so there was absolutely no worries about not having enough juice.

Replace the fuse with a self resetting circuit breaker for a power seat.

That's a sweet trailer. What brand is it?

OK, sounds like my single group 27 idea isn't going to cut it (other people suggesting more juice elsewhere as well). Thanks for the pointer to the Xantrex controller -- that's the brand of inverter I was look at it, they seem to be a good company, and that's exactly the controller logic I was looking for.

I have a pair of 4 AWG wires running from one of the truck batteries to an Anderson connector under the rear bumper already, it's what I used to run the winch when it was on the open trailer. I may well put a connector on the trailer for it for emergency purposes, but I don't really want that connected all the time.

It's a TPD "Titan" trailer from 2005, which I think is the precursor to the "Vortech" trailers they sell now. I've been looking for one of these for a while, this one popped up in San Diego Craigslist last week, so I drove a thousand miles in just over a day to go buy it. :)

A few more photos:

I'd just pick up a small generator, it's more flexible and less work on the near side.

Nice looking trailer!

I too am looking at a generatorless setup for my trailer. What I've settled on is full 12v LED lighting, a 200 Amp/hr battery bank, 160 Watts of solar panels and a 300W inverter for the laptop. I use bottled nitrogen for running the impact gun and filling tires.

I've got the lighting installed and the battery on order.

When time and money allow I'll add the solar charging gear but for now I'll just charge the battery before a race weekend.

An on board 2000-2500 watt generator seems a whole lot easier to deal with then extra batteries, inverters, and heavy gauge wiring. Your buy gas for the car, you buy gas for the generator. There are a number of very quiet generators on the market now besides the Honda's, and for less money!

Oh, and BTY that's a nice trailer too!

I'd probably go generator if it were up to me. Once you get a super beefy inverter, solar panels, and batteries, you're probably not far from just getting a generator. Used RV gensets can be had for not a lot of money on Craigslist and they're pretty quiet.

That having been said, I know a lot of RV people prefer to wire up twice as many 6V batteries instead of using 12V batteries, so you might think about that if you go that route.