Solar system

Guess who has power regardless of where we are parked?  We do!  Husband and Brother extended their home school lessons on electricity and magnetism to include how to hook up this simple, 200W, system last week.

We bought two flexible 100W panels from China for a cost of $200.  They are very lightweight, probably around 5 lbs each.  We are not going to mount them to the Hideout so that we can position them for maximum sun.

They lean against the Hideout well, but can lay on the ground or we can set them on the roof. There are grommets in the corners of the panels and we plan on purchasing a bike lock that we can use to secure them.

The panels are wired into a charge controller located in our underneath storage which regulates the charging of the battery and give us real-time data about the output of the panels and the charge of the battery.  Everything plugs together easily and can be unplugged and stored away quickly.  The Dongle (bright blue) allows us to Bluetooth our tablet or phone to the charge controller with an app that displays the information about the system.

The Hideout really shines when it comes to the alternate systems.  The exhaust fans, the motor for the awning, the water pump, and the furnace blower all run on solar.  Our fridge can run on propane or electricity, so when we are not connected to the shore (traditional electricity) the fridge switches to propane.  The two items we cannot use when on solar are the air conditioning and the microwave.  We can use our television and we can plug in devices to charge through our D/C plug & inverter (meaning we can keep our phones, tablets, and computers charged).  On a full sun day in AZ, we were using all of these things and our panels were producing 140 watts to keep the battery charged.

Currently we have one 12 volt battery, however before we leave for the summer we will have two 6 volt golf cart batteries (to increase the amp hours we have available).  The cords just hang out of the underneath storage when the system is hooked up for the time being.  This is the essence of a very simple, cheap, no fuss system.  We didn't want to drill holes into the RV or permanently alter any of the systems.  We want to play with this and see how it goes before we make longer-term decisions.  

It was so exciting to see this system working for the first time! We're almost ready to hit the road! Only three weeks left of the semester!