Heating options with solar

Almont, What cat heater do you have that draws power??? Mine is strickly propane and use's very little propane to keep our coach very warm.

Don't try inventing the wheel, get Platinum Cat heater - see photos in RoyB post, and there were other pics of installs. There is nothing better. It will draw under 10 AH overnight (depends on how often it's cycling), solar panel can easily harvest that much. Silent, vented, and has thermostat unlike Olimpian aka Wave aka Camco. Very little propane consumption.

With the solar and genny, can you add more batteries to through the night.

jesseannie wrote:
do not have a solution to the cold except to put another blanket on the bed.

Get a heated mattress pad, and, of course, a pure sine inverter.

You really don't need to heat the entire trailer when you're in the bed. However, at 24° you need to run the furnace to keep your pipes from freezing.

jesseannie wrote:
do they now make a more efficient fan for the furnace that I can run on solar?

I don't know, but I assume you mean that solar will replenish its overnight use during the day.

Since we camp at altitudes too high to use the small propane heaters, our only option is to use the solar to keep the batteries up and use the furnace. It was annoying when it woke me the first trip, kinda reassuring when it did on the second trip and now, it doesn't wake us up at all.

A quieter furnace may be the answer if you are only setting the stat to 55* or so. We have a 3 season trailer and even on below freezing night the furnace only runs a few times when we set the stat low. Now that we have solar we set it at 74* deay and night and never think of it.

Of course the SOLAR PANELs only work during the high sun period which is typically around 5-6 hours a day.

You will have to increase your battery banks to be able to use them for running heater fans at night. The Solar would be used to keep the batteries re-charged during the day time hours.

Based on my experience the furnace fan will drain one battery per night using the furnace fan all night. If you have two batteries you can hold out for maybe two nights.

We have 255AHs battery bank capacity on our OFF-ROAD setup and both an Inverter and direct battery connections can run most of all we want to have running in a one/day night run off our batteries. Then the game plane is to re-charge the battery bank back up to their 90% charge state the next morning using my 2KW Honda generator. With the generator running the trailer shore power cable using a RV30A-15A adapter the on-board smart mode converter/charger unit can be recharge my battery bank back up to their 90% charge state in as little as three hours starting at 8Am in the morning during breakfast.

This usually fits with the campgrounds that have generator run time restrictions in place.

Having solar panels installed will help in this situation by not having to use the generator as much to re-charge the batteries during the high sun day.

Using small solar panels for power to run heaters is not going to work well for you... You can only get around 5-6AMPS of DC current from a typical 120WATT Solar Panel when sitting in the high sun. When the sun goes down you will not have any SOLAR OUTPUT. You have to store what sun power you get into batteries to use later.

I would think Propane would be the best solution.. Consider this google search CAT 5 type propane heater install - Pretty neat... All you need is a cabinet door close to outside location for venting.


Just some of my thoughts here...

Roy Ken

Get a Wave 6 Catalytic Heater....All you need to do is leave a vent cracked....It will provide nice warmth with out the darn Furnace fan power consumption.
We have only had Truck Camper but have been using Wave heaters in past three Campers over 25 years.

GARY

For those very cold nights the furnace is the obvious choice despite the noise and energy consumption. I assume you have a generator to re charge your battery bank the following day?

I don't know your other uses of power but for covering your heating needs you could simply replace your 20 year old propane furnace with a new one (quieter and more efficient), install twin 6 volt batteries and add around 250 watts solar. This would easily cover any heating needs with the solar keeping that medium sized battery bank charged and battery running the new propane furnace.

Or just move farther south until it warms up.