Volts and Dehumidifier

pianotuna wrote:
Phil,

I went for 5 years with no generator and 256 watts of solar. Once I went full time I got a generator. In hind sight, I would have been far better off redoing the solar than using expensive, noisy, and fuel consuming generators.

From my point of view, generators are limiting.

Don, you're point of view is the right one for longer term camping where one is staying in campsites for long(er) periods of time, including full time living that includes no-hookup spots. In those situations steady use of the sun whenever the sun is out - to keep, or help keep, the coach batteries topped up - of course makes a lot of sense and is an obvious thing to do.

However for our part-time and spontaneous camping style where we make camping location decisions sometimes at the last minute - including drycamping in campgrounds and drycamping in the boondocks - we usually cannot follow the weather or seek out certain campint spot altitudes to control outside air temperatures. For this RVing style we need to know that power will always be conveniently on tap for up to and including simultaneous use of such heavy load appliances as the microwave plus the air conditioner. We cannot be dependent on the SOC of the house batteries at the time for this kind of spontaneity.

As you know, IMHO the ultimate is A) a good generator system plus a good solar system, or B) a good generator system plus a good fuel cell based automatic battery topping up system.

:)

Phil,

The reason I could do week long trips was that I had 875 amp-hours of battery bank. The solar would return the bank to 100% state of charge between trips. Once I went full time I did not have the "space" between trips for this to work well.

In my last year of full time I burned 3 tanks of fuel in the generator. I was not generally at campsites--but did a lot of urban boondocking where I had a single 15 amp circuit.