This weekend we are finishing up the water system, so I will have some pics of that soon. I had no idea water could require so many trips to Home Depot. Sharkbite took a bite out of my wallet! Fun stuff though...like Legos for water.
I am doing a 180 on refrigeration, even though we already have a brand new Norcold 6.3 3-way ready to install. The fridge is one of the first things we bought when starting this build and at that time I didn't really know what I was doing.
We are going to go with a Nova Kool RFU9000 9.1cuft 12V compressor fridge. There are some benefits to this:
1) 9.1 cuft is 44% more volume than the 6.3 cuft Norcold and fits in the exact same space.
2) No worries about flame, ammonia leaks, or driving with the propane running.
3) Fridge vents to the front so I can seal up the two giant holes I have in the side of the camper (probably will just leave the screen installed but seal it with aluminum behind the screen).
On the solar, we are thinking of going with four 265 watt monocrystaline panels made by solarworld. Each of these panels is 37.5 x 66 inches. In full sun they would provide 1000+ watts. The fridge will probably need around 800 to 1000 watt-hr per 24 hours. Assuming 6 hours of full sun, we would have a surplus of 5000+ watt-hr for other needs. In cloudy weather we could expect about 500 to 1500 watt-hr per day.
I need to figure out what MPPT controller I need and what wire size would be acceptable. A series parallel configuration would be about 60V at 18 amps. I^2R losses in a 25 foot run (50 feet of copper) would be 6.5 watts total for 6AWG cable. In a 30V 36 amp configuration, I^2R losses in the same cable would be 26 watts. I have not looked into what maximum voltage a MPPT controller can take.
These are the panels I am considering, although I do not know yet how they mount or how they handle vibration and wind loads:
http://www.solar-electric.com/solarworld-sunmodule-sw265-monocrystalline-solar-panel.htmlThis is what the four panels would look like on the top of the camper (still a bit of room for other stuff):
