What you can do with solar

Thanks Jason!

Brian,
Thanks so much for sharing our post...and happy we were able to give you the solar "bug".

This video is 100% authentic. We never ran the Generator that day and we did not "fudge" anything. We pride ourselves on creating entertaining and educational content that will hopefully inspire the viewer to "go outside and play"!

We do NOT use as many electronics on a regular day as we did in this video. This video is exclusively shot to see how far we can push our solar and batteries in one day's use, and trying not to deplete our batteries below 50%. This video was created as a continuation of the original 'solar intro' video we created a few months earlier: http://www.gonewiththewynns.com/extreme-rv-solar

At night you can see we turned off the all electronics along with the inverter in order to conserve our batteries for the morning. When we awoke we had to wait for late morning to start running electronics. We kept the fridge on LP all morning, which drastically drops our consumption, and we did not use the water distiller which allowed our batteries to charge back up by the early afternoon. By using the Fridge on LP and not running the distiller we save 4.490KWh which allows us to be completely sustainable without running the generator.

One cannot expect to run as many electronics as we did in the video on a daily basis, the batteries would never reach 100%. I hope this helps clear things up on what one can realistically expect from a good solar setup on their RV.

We have a single 115W panel and almost always dry camp. I've taken along our Kipor 2000 generator "just in case" but have only needed it once. I've found that with 2 6v GC2 batteries (bought at Sears) and the single panel we can go indefinitely if the sun isn't blocked by trees, and if there are lots of trees we can go for about 10 days during the summer and 3-4 if we have to run the furnace.

We have LED lights, shower at the bathhouse, don't have a TV, and the kids know the drill (turning lights off and such)...

I emailed Jason. Referred him to this posting. Will see if he responds on here or replies back to me.

Hi Less Stuff,

That would be 34 amps per hour--probably their "real" harvest is about 5 times that number so 170 amp-hours.

At about 2:16 in the video he states than on a perfect day his system will bring in 34 Amps.

34 Amps X 12 Volts = 408 Watts actual power from their system.

Yet it is implied they can live their lifestyle with it, good on them.

Hi vbwood,

600 watts x 6 perfect solar hours = 3.6 kwh's or slightly more than 1/2 of what they are claiming. Any individual loads that exceed 600 watts would have to get the extra watts from the (puny) battery bank.

The video seems to imply they shut down the electrical system overnight.

I think the portable Go Power is only 120 watts. The two on top are 480 watts combined, but I don't think they are Go Power. Not sure, but I know they had those two installed last year I believe. They mention in the vidoe that they need a couple more batteries. So not sure what what they are getting as far as incoming power. I can ask them about it and what you mentioned and see what they say.

One is led to believe that everything they do in the video is powered by solar. But at the end they say 6.495 kWh consumed not produced. I'm a big fan of solar and have not run a generator since my solar install but there is no way 600 watts of solar will produce that kind of power in a day. The GoPower equipment they have can produce about 34 amps. To produce 6.5 kWh would require at least 13.5 hours at full power. Their genset was getting a pretty good work out as well.

Wow, we have more battery than they do and almost as much solar but we don't use it like they do. I like the induction hot plate and especially like the distiller.