Melinda,

You can go to Jack Mayers website and find all kinds of information on both regular RV electrical and solar systems.  He can give you a very good idea of what is going on with the technology and equipment.

Here is a link to his website:

Jack Mayer website

Terry

We have solar panels on our TT, about 500watts worth which allow us to boon dock up to a week. Paired with our 12volt Engel fridge for extra food and we can go a good 2 - 3 weeks without leaving the comfort of the woods... well until we run out of clean clothes lol!

We monitor power consumption VIA a battery bank volt meter and current power draw. We like to keep power at least 75% otherwise if we NEED power it may not be there.

Recently the DW and I have been thinking of installing the rollable solar panels as an awning which would net us another 300+ watts worth of panel surface area. As it stands right now we run the AC during the night if it gets hot enough and can be fully recharged the next day unelss it was on ALL night like has happened in the past haha.. oops!

Solar Panel kit

We bought the kit there, it allows you to expand to up to 50amps worth of panels and comes with everything we needed to mount and wire them to our TT.

-- Edited by MikeH on Friday 16th of March 2012 08:55:10 AM

We have solar panels and love them for the flexibility they give us, especially when we are out west.

Those with solar panels often fall into two camps:

• Those that try to avoid campgrounds and nightly camping fees and boondock without hook-ups whenever they can, and
• Those, like us, that park in campgrounds with electric hook-ups most of the time, but like having the option of boondocking for a week or two at a time.

For those of us in the second camp, it takes a long, long time to recover the cost of the investment, but it's a lifestyle choice for increased flexibility.

Those in the first camp can recover their investment in campground savings fairly quickly.

The solar panels themselves are almost secondary.  A good, solid battery bank with the capacity you need and a good inverter are the main building blocks of a great solar system. 

Depending on what you want out of it, costs for an entire system can range from about $3,000 to $10,000.

It can get complicated, so I'd recommend checking out our RV Electrical Systems page to ease you into how it all works.  You can skip the stuff you know as it gets more complex the more you scroll through it.  There are several links on that page to other great websites, including Jack's.

A lot of people would love to have solar, but it can be hard to justify the upfront costs depending on planned use.

I have 600 watts of solar on my RV roof feeding 6  6 volts batteries. I am kinda a power hog, but at end of day the batteries are fully charged. I have a Magnum 2000 watt inverter which converts 12 volts DC to 120 volts AC. It is nice when I am in Arizona in the winter to leave in the morning for a ATV ride and come back in the late afternoon and have the batterys charged. And the best thing is no noise.

 

Good Luck on your journey,        Kevin

Check out AMsolar.com for individual components and complete installation kits with everything you need kitted up and shipped out to you. They have a complete kit with a 100 watt panel, MPPT controller, wire harness, mounting brackets, fuse, shunt, etc. for $950 and for another $350 you can add an additional panel and hook it in line with the first and continue to do so until you run out of roof space. What is great about AMsolar is that they are 100% RV oriented and their 100 Watt panels are the smallest around and fit in places where the traditional solar panels that are built for home and commercial use are much to large. Their RV panels are also a third the weight and are high efficiency panels of the latest design.

Rough guide is 100 Watts of solar panel output for every 100 amp hours of house battery capacity. At $1300 the cost is the same as going out an buying a very small portable generator. With a generator I have the maintenance cost and the fuel cost and they don't work very well at higher elevations and their output is actually overkill for charging batteries. Add in that I need to stick around and monitor the generators whereas the solar setup regulates itself and the charge delivered to the batteries. Many controllers include amp addition and removal metering for the house batteries which works like the fuel gauge for your vehicle to tell you the status.

We cannot run the AC on solar and we cannot run the microwave but we can live with using them when and where we have shore power. Solar fits in much better with our desire to get away and out into the "wilds" which is not at all in line with running a noisy generator for several hours a day to keep our batteries charged.

Assuming you want to be off grid for whatever your motivation, the problem with the “small” generator to charge the batteries is you really can’t leave the rig – at least in my opinion.  If you want to go off in the day you really can’t leave the generator running (at least in most situations) to charge up the batteries; at least it seemed that way to me – correction - us.  That was the reason we decided to bit the bullet and have me install some solar equipment.  The solar panels have more than enough power to recharge the batteries fully if AH use was reasonable the night before and the sun is out most of the day.  If not they will finish up what the big 5,500 watt generator with a charger started and you can leave the rig after the morning coffee / breakfast time and most likely come home to a fully topped off bank.  (We’ve got 300AH AGM’s which is not a huge amount, but enough for us based on our previous off-grid times.)

 

We happen to have chosen 4 – GO-100 watt panels and a MPPT controller supplied by AM Solar.  A pretty nice package for those who want to do their own installation.  Probably the two biggest problems with the installation is getting 2 pieces of #2 wire from the roof to the solar charge controller and then getting a tool to properly crimp #4/0 cables necessary from the battery bank to the inverter.  You can do it with a hammer crimper, but I was able to get an electric/hydraulic unit from a buddy electrical contractor.  A $6,500 tool but it makes really nice crimps.

 

For the price vs. size vs. output the GO-100 panels from AM Solar (made by Grape Solar according to the ID tags) seem to be a good choice for those of us with limited roof space due to 2 AC units, TV antenna, a sky light, 2 fan vents and a large satellite antenna already installed.  They’re size allowed placement away from the dreaded shadows, were lightweight, but still were high enough in voltage for the MPPT controller to have some effective current “boost” and necessary voltage regulation for proper charging.

 

Everything is a slight compromise when you retrofit things, but this worked out pretty nice in our rig.  But it is a lot of work to totally rebuild the 12 volt system the way Jack did with Howard and Linda.  I knew it would be, but kinda fun.  But it’s done now and we’ll now have some additional camping options.

 

Isn’t this fun?

 

Bill

Well, for once, Jack, I will take a bit of a variance on your opinion.  Yes, the skills to do a solar installation are not much more than pulling cable in a wall and installing a breaker in the panel and an outlet in the wall.  However, if you have never worked with high current / low voltage cable (its big and somewhat difficult) or don’t understand why you need heat shrink and no-ox compound on the connectors, best to read carefully Jack’s excellent dissertation on solar installations.  There are rules which must be followed for best and safe results.

 

High current 12 volt wiring, both solar and high current, is not very complicated, but there are rules that must be observed and Jack does a good job of explaining those.  So, do the reading first, follow the rules, and you will have a success experience.  I have well over 40 years of electrical experience and his comments were still helpful in the design stage.  An excellent web site.

 

Bill