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My rig has a basic electrical system, a small house battery, a generator, and no AC inverter or solar panels.
I’m currently looking into:
1. Pure Sine Wave Inverter
2. House Battery Bank
3. Solar PanelsChoosing the amount of power capacity for batteries and the inverter, not to mention the best location on the RV to install them are a couple of the biggest factors to consider.
Another big consideration is how much space available for the various components.I want to start with a least 2 100Amp
batteries, wired in parallel, and a 2000 watt pure sine wave inverter. As far as solar panels go, I would like to start with at least 300-400 watts.Hopefully, 2015 will be a good year for this project.
Hi Jay, that sounds like a fun project. You are wise to go with a true sine wave inverter but you will run into some limitations on your batteries. Your target to start out with is 200 amps of battery (don’t forget to buy true deep cycle batteries, not marine batteries). 200 amps @ 12 volt will render 200*12 watts, or 2400 total watts capacity. Since discharging deep cycle batteries beyond 50% will quickly destroy them, only half of that capacity is useable. So now you have 1200 watts. Take into account power lost on storage and conversion (nothing is 100% efficient) and you subtract another 20%. Now your actual usable power is 960 watts. If you really had a big load you wanted to use that 2000 watt inverter with, your batterys would last about 15 minutes (taking peukerts law of discharge into account) or about 3.5 hours with a 300 watt load. You will need a lot of batteries to feed that 2kw inverter. Just saying.
I’m installing two solar panels on my travel trailer and it has a curved roof. Do you have any suggestions on the best way to install them? Thanks
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