We knew early on that we wanted to be as self-contained and self-sufficient as possible, especially in the area of power. It’s taken us some time but we’re finally to the point where we don’t worry as much about running out of gas for our generator.
Before we hit the road, we purchased a used Champion gasoline generator. So far it’s been one of the best purchases we’ve made. But the single battery we started with wasn’t enough to keep our furnace running at night, even when it was fully charged. It took us quite awhile to figure that out though (thinking it was a dead or defective battery more than issues with our power draw).
About four months into our full-time RV living journey we purchased our first solar panels. After much research and review of our budget we decided to purchase the Renogy 200w Solar Starter Kit. The panels worked great at keeping our battery charged during the day, but we were still having issues with keeping things running at night.
A couple months later we purchased two additional deep-cycle 12v batteries, wired them in parallel, then hooked that battery bank up to our solar system. This worked so much better to keep our furnace and fridge running overnight, but didn’t prevent us from needing to run our generator during the day to keep my laptop and our phones charged.
While we were in California recently we finally decided to purchase a third 100-watt solar panel from Renogy along with a VertaMax 1500 watt pure sine wave inverter and a GoPower! TS-30 automatic transfer switch. This configuration has finally met most of our power needs, and as long as we have days of full sun we only need to run our generator for a few hours during the evening.
We plan on expanding our solar system to add one more 100 watt panel and to purchase a different charge controller, but for now we’re doing just fine.
How our system is configured
We have three 100-watt solar panels attached to our roof. We removed our TV antenna and fed our panel cables through that opening to the charge controller, which is mounted on the wall next to our refrigerator. The charge controller is connected directly to our batteries.
To our battery bank we connected our inverter, the inverter is connected to the transfer switch, and the transfer switch is connected to our main power cable and the RV’s converter. It looks something like the image below.
We are not electricians and did have some help installing the inverter and transfer switch, but the rest we did ourselves so we’re not completely helpless.
So what do we think?
So far we are really happy with our system. The Renogy solar panels do a great job of keeping our batteries charged and the inverter helps us reduce our fuel consumption from the generator. We’re not sure the Wanderer charge controller that came with our starter kit is the best for our setup, though, so we plan on replacing that the next time we upgrade our system. We may also switch to lithium batteries in the future but that won’t happen anytime soon. Our generator is by no means quiet, but it doesn’t bother us when we’re boondocking away from other campers. We’ll upgrade to a quieter model when this one quits working.
So what do you think of our setup? Do you have solar power for your off-grid home or RV? Please tell us about it, we’d love to hear from you!
[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]