Would solar be effective in the midwest?

If you can tilt the panel for optimal orientation, you can pick up another 10-15% of charging.

Snow will be the biggest problem.

Winter will be marginal. 400 watts and a second battery might be needed. Not every day is all sunny.

You're using 650W per day with a 200W panel. Assume you get 60% of the panel watts for 4 hours or 480W per day. You'll need at least 400W panels and you will still need extra power for those multiple consecutive days of no sun.

Solar is just a way to extend the time between generator/charger recharging. IE before the battery reaches the low point you pick before you must recharge it. That low point is lower with Li as has been discussed. 30-80% is a 50AH range

"Effective" would be defined as whether it extends the time enough. "Enough" might be defined as from Friday to Tuesday if the object is a long weekend with no generator. A full-timer would have to decide how long is enough. If the gen is being used anyway, the value of solar drops.

Iowa and winter. It may be too cold to recharge the batteries. I.E. the battery management system may prevent charging to save the battery.

pianotuna wrote:
Iowa and winter. It may be too cold to recharge the batteries.

Good point. Op, better check that out. Facing panels south and tilting would be a good idea.

You also want to use a solar charge controller that is specifically designed to work with lifepo4 batteries. Most solar chargers will work with them, but that's not the same. Lead acid batteries can only take a full charge to 80%, then trickle charge until full. Lifepo4 can take a full charge all the way. If your solar charger is set up for lead acid batteries it will still work, but will only trickle charge when battery is 80% full and will be wasting all that potential solar power.

PS - Many people complain that their solar panels aren't putting out th power they expected, when in fact it is their solar controller limiting the charge because the batteries are more than 80% full.

Seattle Steve wrote:
You also want to use a solar charge controller that is specifically designed to work with lifepo4 batteries..

Or one whose setpoints are adjustable.

Lead acid batteries can accept "full charge" well past 80% SOC

It is all about the "charging rate", which is the amps/AH of battery bank. At any charging voltage, the lower the charging rate, the higher the SOC before amps taper at the end of Bulk and VV.

Solar often has lower max amps wrt the size of the battery bank, so that makes for a low charging rate, and so the end of Bulk in the 90s for SOC.

I don't understand what possible settings you can have on a solar controller that would alter that. The battery type settings usually only change the high voltage set point, which can change the amps being accepted. Higher voltage can mean more amps at any given SOC if the solar can provide more amps. Not going to change the charging rate very much between 14.4 and 14.8 eg.