How Many Solar Panels Do You Need For An Rv

Just like in your home your trailer s major appliances are 120 volt ac powered.

How many solar panels do you need for an rv. If you have an 800w rv solar panel system that is in direct sunlight for 5 hours a day you ll produce approximately 4 000 wh of energy each day 5 x 800 4 000. The more ah you have the more solar panels you ll need if you have a single 12 volt battery at about 100 ah you should have 300 watts of solar panels minimum. According to our calculations in the. This is also assuming of course you have a lot of battery power too.

Solar panels lastly you will need the solar panels to keep the battery charged. A 12 volt battery can t produce ac power which is where an inverter comes in and where solar stops meaning just solar panels. Tips for estimating rv solar panel needs although actual output may vary based on the factors mentioned above you can get yourself to a ballpark figure using a couple of tips. How many panels do you need.

Most solar panels feature one hundred watts of power and are capable of producing about six amps for each peak sun hour. Most boondockers have between 200 to 400 amp hour battery banks. This equals thirty amp hours a day meaning you would need two one hundred watt panels to fully recharge your rv. For this example if you are using 404 kwh per year that is 1 11 kwh per day.

If you want to run 120 volt ac appliances you will need an inverter to. But i have seen plenty of 160 watt panels. There are a lot of starter kits that include them like this one i m not affiliated just found you an example. Now i ve not seen a 133 watt solar panel for sale.

Our final personal determination. This is assuming you are considering using 12 volt rv grade panels. There are 100 170 200 225 265 300 335 and 360 watt solar panels. You will need at least 1 800 watts of solar panels to run your rv air conditioner.

Divide both sides by 30 and you need 1 33 100 watt solar panels. The first decision you need to make is about major appliances. We suggest a battery bank of 800 amp hours. The general rule of thumb is that a 100 watt solar panel can produce about 30 amp hours per day so you can use this guideline to determine about how many panels you need.

So you are going to need a total wattage of 300 combined solar panels. With two 12 volt batteries or two 6 volt batteries with between 200 250 ah you should have 600 watts of solar panels minimum. Most solar panels for rvs are between 100 and 400 watts of power and a full system might be about 800 watts. First off stop thinking in number of solar panels.

So from our camping experiment we ve determined that a 160 watt panel will keep our batteries topped off most days and that kit fits the bill.