Forum Discussion
dieseltruckdriv
Dec 23, 2021Explorer II
I agree with the other posters here. You seem to be taking the loads that are listed as maximum and trying to correlate that to a 24 hour draw. Almost nothing works that way. Your laptop might use that much power for two hours a day while you are recharging the battery.
When you are doing your calculations, convert everything to watts. Then understand that in my experience my wattage charge numbers come in slightly lower than what 2oldman posted because when the sun is out, you are getting 13.6 volts or higher and that drops the amps needed even more. The 12.5 amps is a safe voltage number with no solar input. I am assuming some solar input during the day based on my experience.
On top of that you have to remember that almost everything has a duty cycle. That means maybe 2 hours a day to recharge your laptop. It might mean (I have no idea) 45% of the time your fridge needs peak power but not 100% of the time. Taking that into consideration you have to do some more homework before you get some true useable numbers.
Now that I have put that out there our personal experience is we can get by on probably 300 watts of solar. We know from experience that 200 is the bare minimum, and the 420 we have now can last us a long time, unless we get several cloudy days. That's why I am adding at least a couple hundred more watts. That gets us as much tv as we want to watch with the fridge, coffee maker and water heater on propane.
For some background, when we bought our current fifth wheel my wife told me she wants to be able to live a normal life without having to worry about power. I bought what I thought would work and over time found out I undersized the inverter which is 375 watts. Last summer she thought she would like to be able to use the microwave once in a while without the generator also. I had a 1200 watt inverter picked out but I might upgrade to an even 2000 watts after she said that. I reminded her that we would also need some more battery capacity to do that. We have two group 31 AGMs currently. If I buy more batteries I am getting lithium batteries for the duty cycle.
When you are doing your calculations, convert everything to watts. Then understand that in my experience my wattage charge numbers come in slightly lower than what 2oldman posted because when the sun is out, you are getting 13.6 volts or higher and that drops the amps needed even more. The 12.5 amps is a safe voltage number with no solar input. I am assuming some solar input during the day based on my experience.
On top of that you have to remember that almost everything has a duty cycle. That means maybe 2 hours a day to recharge your laptop. It might mean (I have no idea) 45% of the time your fridge needs peak power but not 100% of the time. Taking that into consideration you have to do some more homework before you get some true useable numbers.
Now that I have put that out there our personal experience is we can get by on probably 300 watts of solar. We know from experience that 200 is the bare minimum, and the 420 we have now can last us a long time, unless we get several cloudy days. That's why I am adding at least a couple hundred more watts. That gets us as much tv as we want to watch with the fridge, coffee maker and water heater on propane.
For some background, when we bought our current fifth wheel my wife told me she wants to be able to live a normal life without having to worry about power. I bought what I thought would work and over time found out I undersized the inverter which is 375 watts. Last summer she thought she would like to be able to use the microwave once in a while without the generator also. I had a 1200 watt inverter picked out but I might upgrade to an even 2000 watts after she said that. I reminded her that we would also need some more battery capacity to do that. We have two group 31 AGMs currently. If I buy more batteries I am getting lithium batteries for the duty cycle.
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