Solar Install, Reflection 29RS Fifth Wheel

[tmakie]

Brian,

I found this link to be helpful when I was sizing my controller. https://www.explorist.life/solar-cha...er-calculator/

Todd

[Country Campers]

Small update:

We recently spent 3 nights dry camping at one of our favorite state park campgrounds, ulterior motives was fishing. The days were very hot with highs near 90 F, nights were nice dropping into the 70's F. First night we ran the ac for about 1 hour before going to bed to cool the camper down, there was a nice breeze outside but the camper was pointing into the breeze so not much getting into the camper. Running the ac and the all of the 12 v dc items during the day ran our battery bank down to around 80%, full is 630 ah. Morning was greeted with coffee and toast making on 120 v ac, for me to get this system it had to make coffee and be able to operate the AC which it does both. This dropped the batteries down to about 76% By around 3:00 in the afternoon the solar had charged the batteries back to 100% so we got to have almost full charge againg for evening ac to cool the camper. This all worked good for the 3 nights we were there, one morning we were down to 72%. We did not use any other 120v ac items, tv, microwave, or others. The reason for not using any other items was to see what our draw would be if we needed to be very frugal.
The solar panels worked very well with the controller pumping in around 35 amps and 550 w. The sunshine was fantastic but we did have a little morning shade that slowed the process down a bit, I would rather have a little morning shade though. I did check the shade on the panels and did come to learn that shade part of one panel sure drops its performance.

Very happy with the system and thankful for all of the sunshine we got to take advantage of, cloudy days would have been cause to get the generator out which I carry for these trips.

Brian

[KSC_Travels]

Small update:

We recently spent 3 nights dry camping at one of our favorite state park campgrounds, ulterior motives was fishing. The days were very hot with highs near 90 F, nights were nice dropping into the 70's F. First night we ran the ac for about 1 hour before going to bed to cool the camper down, there was a nice breeze outside but the camper was pointing into the breeze so not much getting into the camper. Running the ac and the all of the 12 v dc items during the day ran our battery bank down to around 80%, full is 630 ah. Morning was greeted with coffee and toast making on 120 v ac, for me to get this system it had to make coffee and be able to operate the AC which it does both. This dropped the batteries down to about 76% By around 3:00 in the afternoon the solar had charged the batteries back to 100% so we got to have almost full charge againg for evening ac to cool the camper. This all worked good for the 3 nights we were there, one morning we were down to 72%. We did not use any other 120v ac items, tv, microwave, or others. The reason for not using any other items was to see what our draw would be if we needed to be very frugal.
The solar panels worked very well with the controller pumping in around 35 amps and 550 w. The sunshine was fantastic but we did have a little morning shade that slowed the process down a bit, I would rather have a little morning shade though. I did check the shade on the panels and did come to learn that shade part of one panel sure drops its performance.

Very happy with the system and thankful for all of the sunshine we got to take advantage of, cloudy days would have been cause to get the generator out which I carry for these trips.

Brian

Nice Brian.

Actually - looks like you only used ~30% of your battery capacity each day (while being energy frugal). You might have made it 3 days without using the generator!

[Jlawles2]

Nice test. On day 3 when you were down to 76% you should have followed your standard ritual. This would have told you how much the system could recover. You already knew it was capable of recovering from 76%.