Another SOLAR question!!!
We have been living in a TT full time for well over a year. Now its high time we start weaning ourselves off of grid power. We will be moving our camper onto land without shore power. So we plan to ge...
Forum Discussion
Sounds like you are wanting to run off the solar panels and not batteries.
The purpose of the solar panels is to keep your batteries re-charged so that you can have DC POWER available 24/7 whether you are in high sun or not. Hopefully you will be at a location where you are allowed to run your generator anytime you want to... Public places don't allow this to happen anymore it seems... Private places is up to the property owner...
The plan is to decide what things you want to operate and then build up your battery bank and trailer power systems to do that running an INVERTER for the 120VAC items and directly to the battery bank for the DC items. What we do here is after planning everything we want our battery banks to get to their 50% charge state at 8AM each morning when we are allowed to run our generator. Then we can recharge the battery banks back up to their 90% charge state in a three hour generator run time period. Having solar panel we could only maybe have to run the generator for the first hour and then allow the solar panels to finish the 90% or higher battery state charge before the high sun goes away.
Once you get all of that decided then you will need to have the generator to re-charge your battery bank when they get down the the 50% charge state by plugging the trailer shore power cable into the 120VAC generator receptacle using a RV30A-15A long adapter (WALMART). The generator will re-charge your battery banks back up to their 90% charge state in a quick three hour generator run time using your on-board converter/charger unit to do the charging of the batteries..
Now you can start adding 200 to 400 watts of solar panels to keep you from running the generator so much. The solar panels will produce power when high sun so the plan is to capture this solar power into the batteries so you can use anytime you need to. A typical 120WATT solar panel will only give you around 5-6AMPS DC Current.
You will always want to have the generator around to re-charge the batteries if the high sun doesn't do it... Otherwise it gets dark on you around 10PM at night and you will finally ruin your batteries because you are not keeping them charged in the proper sequence cycle.
The whole thing needs planned out in order to work for you. You just can't show up a solar panel and expect it all to work... Won't happen...
We are now at the part of adding solar panels to our setup. Have been running off our batteries for the past few years and really know what to expect now. Adding solar panels is icing on the cake now.
Roy Ken
The purpose of the solar panels is to keep your batteries re-charged so that you can have DC POWER available 24/7 whether you are in high sun or not. Hopefully you will be at a location where you are allowed to run your generator anytime you want to... Public places don't allow this to happen anymore it seems... Private places is up to the property owner...
The plan is to decide what things you want to operate and then build up your battery bank and trailer power systems to do that running an INVERTER for the 120VAC items and directly to the battery bank for the DC items. What we do here is after planning everything we want our battery banks to get to their 50% charge state at 8AM each morning when we are allowed to run our generator. Then we can recharge the battery banks back up to their 90% charge state in a three hour generator run time period. Having solar panel we could only maybe have to run the generator for the first hour and then allow the solar panels to finish the 90% or higher battery state charge before the high sun goes away.
Once you get all of that decided then you will need to have the generator to re-charge your battery bank when they get down the the 50% charge state by plugging the trailer shore power cable into the 120VAC generator receptacle using a RV30A-15A long adapter (WALMART). The generator will re-charge your battery banks back up to their 90% charge state in a quick three hour generator run time using your on-board converter/charger unit to do the charging of the batteries..
Now you can start adding 200 to 400 watts of solar panels to keep you from running the generator so much. The solar panels will produce power when high sun so the plan is to capture this solar power into the batteries so you can use anytime you need to. A typical 120WATT solar panel will only give you around 5-6AMPS DC Current.
You will always want to have the generator around to re-charge the batteries if the high sun doesn't do it... Otherwise it gets dark on you around 10PM at night and you will finally ruin your batteries because you are not keeping them charged in the proper sequence cycle.
The whole thing needs planned out in order to work for you. You just can't show up a solar panel and expect it all to work... Won't happen...
We are now at the part of adding solar panels to our setup. Have been running off our batteries for the past few years and really know what to expect now. Adding solar panels is icing on the cake now.
Roy Ken
