School me on these solar packages

NinerBikes wrote:

I just went down this road. Two group 27's are about 85 to 90 Ah's each, about 170-180 total. Next time, replace them with some 6 volt 225 ah golf cart batteries and wire them in series, not in parallel.

As for solar panels. You just missed out on Black Friday specials at Solar Blvd with some really good pricing.

My guess is that you'll need about a watt per amp. With portable, you'll need to aim the panels, probably 2 of them 2 or 3 times a day at the sun. You should go with a Poly crystal panel, and I'd go with two 120 watt panels. That should be good for about 15 amps /hr. by about 5 or 6 hours in winter, 12 or more in summer, somewhere in between spring and fall. The last things you need are 12 gauge wire, 50 foot sections, maybe 1 or two of them, to run to a PWM Charge Controller rated for 20 amps, about $20 online on ebay, and the shortest possible run of 6 or 8 gauge wires from the controller, which should be mounted as near to the batteries as possible but not exposed to the vented gasses a charging set of batteries puts off. 3 to 5 feet or 6 or 8 gauge from the controller to the battery, to cut the voltage losses down between the controller and battery. A couple of 100 watt poly crystal or 120 watt poly crystal panels should do it.

LINKY

If you kit the pieces together yourself, you'll get a better system. Read up, do searches here, and then decide what is best for you. I am thinking for portability, two 100 to 120 watt panels will do you, 120's if you ride mostly in the winter time when cool with shorter days and less hours to charge up.