Here comes the sun

One of my pet projects on our trailer was installing a solar battery charging system. We'll be dry docking it (camping lingo for staying at a campsite without power or water hookups) for 10 days on our trip west so wanted to make sure we'd have enough battery power for lights, water pump, refrigerator (even on propane it uses some juice), and maybe even run the heater for a bit.

So I installed a Renogy 100 Watt Solar Panel. I started with one panel and after practice camping a few times seemed like we'd probably be ok with one if we had decent sun but with two we should be good even if its cloudy out.  Also all the hard work was already done so just plugging in another panel and screwing it down was a piece of cake.

Here's a couple of shots of the panels on top of the trailer.  I screwed them down with 1 inch multi material screws and lots of Dicor Sealant.

Overall project wasn't very hard just a pain to find a way to get the wires down to the controller and the battery.  But there was tons to learn about the electrical system and batteries of the camper.

Charge controller for the system took some time to decide which one to get,. I ended up getting a Renogy 30 amp charge controller. Deciding factor was a decent price and it had a digital display. Looks like there are a lot of different brands that all probably come from the same factory so went with Renogy brand to keep it in the family with the panels.  

 

The trailer has two 12 volt Interstate SRM-24 batteries. They were new when we bought the camper so we're sticking with them even though the marine/rv deep cycle batteries aren't all that highly recommended. They are 84 amp hour batteries so with 2 of them we can, in theory, get 84 amp hours (shouldn't ever take the batteries down below a 50% charge to avoid damaging them). But like most things in reality it'll likely be quite a bit less than the 84. We thought about adding another battery but with the solar system (especially adding two panels) I think we should be fine. Guess we'll find out soon.

rvsolar101.blogspot.com is a good site I ran across that walks through most of what you need to know if you're interested in learning more about rv solar systems.