Going Solar with an RV for a week!

Using my 350 watts of solar panels along with my two 6volts batteries had given me good results the few times I have gone dry camping since we had kept the outings to short ones, less than two days.


A real challenge is when you plan on going on extended stays without any hookups, and this is what we set out to do when we identified in January 2016 that Assateague Island, where wild ponies roam free, would be our next summer destination.

In anticipation of that trip, I had replace my modified sine wave inverter with a Pure sine wave one, hoping that this would allow me to run all of my stuff safely and without hiccups (except for the AC!)


I also had gotten two brand new CRown CR-240 6 Volts batteries, which afforded me plenty of power storage (around 240 amps hours, or 3000 watt-hour)


Assateague Island is a great place for solar since your solar panels are getting no shadow all day long.


Upon getting there, I noted that my batteries where totally charged since the ride there allowed the solar panels and the truck alternator to keep them fully charged.

I hooked up the shore power directly to my inverter and voilà, we had AC and DC, and plenty of it.


For the 7 days we stayed there, we averaged over around 2000 watts of solar power going back to the batteries, which is not bad considering that my panels are mounted on the roof of the trailer and therefore not pointing fully toward the sun.


We did get one day where it rained and where I only netted around 300 watts of solar power, and a quick one hour run of my Honda 2000watt generator gave enough juice back into the batteries to get them over a 50% discharge state that everyone tells you to stay away from.


All of that went well, this only thing that did not go as well as I would have like is when I would try and use the microwave, for say 4-5 minutes. This amount of draw (1300watts) @ 12v meant I was drawing close to 120 amps. The gauge of the wiring between the inverter and the batteries got really hot a few times. That tells me I will have to increase the size of the wiring.


Ideally, I would also decrease the length of the wire but that really is not an option for me given the location of the inverter.


All in all, I was able to go a week on solar power for the most part, and we ran many fans and lights in the trailer without any issues.


Having said that, most people around me would run generators for hours on end to charge their batteries back every night. A guy in an old Allegro motorhome beside us drove us crazy with running his generators for hours!!