Solar and battery help
Good Morning. I am hoping someone can provide a simple answer or 4 for me. I just read a post on the TC forum about flexible, light weight 100 watt solar panels and love the look of this, I have a Nor...
Forum Discussion
Lots needs to be considered to properly set up solar for your rig. You can base it on how much power you use. How much battery you have. What kind of conditions you are in. Honestly though, it's a combination of all of them.
A properly balanced system starts with you knowing how much power you use daily. You need enough battery to support that use for X amount of days. I say X because it is affected by room and budget. Once you know how much battery to have, get enough solar to get them back up quickly after a few days of clouds. A prudent thing to have is a back up means of charging for when MR sun doesn't play nice for too long.
Now that you know how much solar to get, balanced with amount of room on the roof and budget, you can start thinking about which panel/s fit your needs and conditions the best. The most efficient panel in bright sun sucks in lower light. The panel that can provide in lower light is huge in foot print for the watts it produces. The choice is a balance of room, budget and production. In the end you may have to compromise.
One thing I have learned about batteries from the forum is that some of the cooler ones are just a PITA to keep charged up. I have the same grp 27 as you and it is easy to keep up. I would have to replace my charge controllers and converter to switch to fancy AGM batteries. Again, making sure al of the components work well together is part of the balance.
You asked about the watt vs AH ratio. We have 720w of panel for 345 ah of battery. That gets the batteries up fast when we have limited sun and keeps them in float all day unless we run a big load like the microwave. Even then the recovery is very quick and the batts are always fully charged by night fall. Loads that are smaller than the output of the panels are not seen by the battery at all. The TV/sat runs all day and never has a effect. next year I'll run a 5000 BTU AC unit and if it doesn't run straight off the panel, what comes out of the battery will be very little.
My panels are huge and not 12v, so I'll let others advise you on the proper set up.
A properly balanced system starts with you knowing how much power you use daily. You need enough battery to support that use for X amount of days. I say X because it is affected by room and budget. Once you know how much battery to have, get enough solar to get them back up quickly after a few days of clouds. A prudent thing to have is a back up means of charging for when MR sun doesn't play nice for too long.
Now that you know how much solar to get, balanced with amount of room on the roof and budget, you can start thinking about which panel/s fit your needs and conditions the best. The most efficient panel in bright sun sucks in lower light. The panel that can provide in lower light is huge in foot print for the watts it produces. The choice is a balance of room, budget and production. In the end you may have to compromise.
One thing I have learned about batteries from the forum is that some of the cooler ones are just a PITA to keep charged up. I have the same grp 27 as you and it is easy to keep up. I would have to replace my charge controllers and converter to switch to fancy AGM batteries. Again, making sure al of the components work well together is part of the balance.
You asked about the watt vs AH ratio. We have 720w of panel for 345 ah of battery. That gets the batteries up fast when we have limited sun and keeps them in float all day unless we run a big load like the microwave. Even then the recovery is very quick and the batts are always fully charged by night fall. Loads that are smaller than the output of the panels are not seen by the battery at all. The TV/sat runs all day and never has a effect. next year I'll run a 5000 BTU AC unit and if it doesn't run straight off the panel, what comes out of the battery will be very little.
My panels are huge and not 12v, so I'll let others advise you on the proper set up.
