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.
How many solar panels needed for rv a x.
This equals thirty amp hours a day meaning you would need two one hundred watt panels to fully recharge your rv.
However you can use the same procedure to estimate how many are needed.
On the other hand if they are 330w panels only 21 are needed.
100 watt solar panel approximately 6 amps hour in direct summer sun no clouds here s an example of our calculation of how much the solar panels are generating to recharge our rv batteries.
To generate the stored electricity needed to run our rv air conditioner all day you d need over 340 square feet of solar panels ish plus 3600 amp hours of battery capacity and guaranteed perfect sunshine.
Lastly you will need the solar panels to keep the battery charged.
Clearly this kind of setup can get pricey pretty quickly.
For this example if you are using 404 kwh per year that is 1 11 kwh per day.
The number of solar panels needed for rv boondocking depends on how many batteries you have to keep charged.
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.
This is assuming you are considering using 12 volt rv grade panels.
A big misconception with rv solar is that you need 500 600 or 900 watts of solar for it to be worth it.
So you are going to need a total wattage of 300 combined solar panels.
If you use 250w panels you need 27 of them.
5 hours of direct sunlight x 6 amps generated hour 30 amp hours day.
You multiply the combined wattage of the solar panels by the number of hours sunlight.
How did i come up with 300.
This is also assuming of course you have a lot of battery power too.
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.
You ll need to add up the total amp hours ah your batteries are capable of holding.
Reality is you only need as many panels as your batteries are able to store and your usage warrants.
This doesn t include the solar power needed to run anything else in the rv.
By this estimate we ll need about 2 500 watts of solar panels just to break even on the ac unit s consumption.
You will need at least 1 800 watts of solar panels to run your rv air conditioner.
100 watt portable solar panel.
If you have a rough idea of your power needs you need to check a solar panel s spec sheet and look for the watt rating the peak power amps and peak power volts.
Solar shingles are smaller than panels and their wattage is lower as a result.
It doesn t matter how many panels you have if you don t have the battery bank to store the energy your panels are pulling in.