RV Solar 101 : Everything a Beginner Needs to Know !

0:00 [Music] hey brian here with diy outdoor life today's an exciting video because we're going to be talking about solar this is a super exciting topic i've been obsessed with this since i was a kid and i used to cover up the calculator panel in math class and watch the screen fade out now a lot has

0:23 developed in the last 10 years this equipment is more advanced and it's a lot more affordable the problem is there are some challenges when you're talking about sizing and sorting through all of the different gear that's available on the market i'm going to try to make this easier for you today we're going to make

0:43 this beginner friendly and cover all of these topics in great detail so let's uh be patient and stay tuned so the equipment we need to charge our camper from the sun is obviously a solar panel and we obviously need a battery on the camper but we're also going to need a charge controller this is the brains

1:04 of the operation this is what takes the energy from a solar panel and converts it into a charging profile that can be used for a battery a lot of beginners just starting off don't know about charge controllers i find questions all the time on the internet about plugging solar panels into an rv this is an

1:24 essential component otherwise a solar panel would overcharge or damage the battery when we're first getting started the most important part of this equation is actually the battery on our rv this is the bottleneck this is the weak link in the equation and when i see people just getting started off asking

1:47 questions about solar a lot of people come in and start talking about different types of panels and the charge controller this is where you have to start now what i'm concerned with is the amount of capacity you have on your rv battery this is an agm battery and it has a 100 amp hours that means we can

2:07 use 50 amp hours so whether you have a 50 amp hour lithium or 100 amp hour agm you have the same capacity now i'll put a tag to another video i did comparing different battery chemistries for rv but for today we're talking about that capacity i want you to realize that this is like a rain barrel and if you have a

2:31 small rain barrel and it's raining out by about 9 a.m the barrel is going to start to overflow that energy is wasted it's the same with your battery if your rv came with a 50 amp hour agm or a type of car battery you're not going to be able to store the energy that you're creating

2:52 from solar panels so everything upstream of the battery is wasted so we have to start here now unfortunately i'm not able to tell you what capacity battery you need without a bunch of questions and a lot of consultations but i can give you a tip here you're going to want to be able to go

3:13 for about three days unplugged with no solar without running your battery down to low voltage this is a very important number if you can go friday saturday sunday on just your battery then we know once we go to solar that we can handle a rainy day or a day that we don't have to set

3:36 our solar equipment out if your battery is so small that you deplete it after one night camping you're going to run into the same issues even if you spend a lot of money on solar now these numbers are going to be different whether you live in san diego or you live in seattle but what i'm getting at is that if you

3:55 don't have enough capacity to bridge some periods of time without your solar hooked up you're not going anywhere anyway so let's start with that capacity a three day capacity once our battery is sized properly we can start thinking about solar panels now there is a million and one different

4:15 types of solar panels out there so i'm gonna narrow this down and make a couple recommendations and then i'm gonna break things into categories to compare the pros and cons for you for starters panels can come in monocrystalline or polycrystalline now monocrystalline you get more bang for the buck the panels

4:35 work better it's a more advanced technology my recommendation is to not even consider anything but monocrystalline panels now luckily most of the reputable distributors out there and vendors are only selling monocrystalline panels but i can find things on amazon and find things online

4:55 that are still selling the less efficient polycrystalline panels they're really not worth your time now once we have decided that we're going with monocrystalline there's a few more things to consider the two types of categories for installation are fixed panel and portable panel and there's pros and cons

5:17 to each a fixed panel might look like this style of panel that can either be attached to a roof rack or it can actually come with hardware to be lagged down to the roof of your camper obviously there's waterproofing sealant and it's a perfectly fine way to install solar panels the other style of fixed

5:37 panel actually gets taped with a double-sided vhb tape it's a thin flexible panel now i don't have one of these to demonstrate because they are notoriously fragile when you get one of them you install it right away when you're trying to store them or do demonstrations with them you end up

5:57 breaking them but whether you're going with the vhb taped flexible panel or a bolt-on panel either for a roof rack or lagged right down onto the roof these are fixed solar applications so some of the advantages of the fixed panels are that they're always set up the panels are bolted onto your roof so

6:20 there's no setup when you get to camp there the other advantage is that they're harder to steal unfortunately we have to consider these things when we're talking about expensive outdoor gear it's much more difficult to steal a panel that's bolted onto your camper than it is to steal a portable panel

6:39 the disadvantages however are that there might be some installation costs associated with this if you're not comfortable screwing into your roof and doing the waterproofing and the other advantage disadvantage is that they don't work as well you're not able to angle them at the sun you might

6:58 want to park your camper in the shade for these reasons a portable panel actually harvests a lot more energy than one that's fixed to your camper now when working with portable panels there's a lot of options as well now all of these panels we're using are monocrystalline but they have some

7:18 different features these glass panels are permanent outside installation panels you can bolt these to the roof of your cabin and they're going to work for many many years there's an advantage to that because they're very rugged these goal zero bolder ones that i'm demonstrating are

7:36 some of the better ones that i've seen they have thick corner protection and the suitcase style allows you to fold these up so that they're easier to pack away now the advantages of these are that they work the best you're going to get the best performance out of these panels of any panel that you're going to buy

7:55 the disadvantage is that they can be kind of cumbersome they're heavy that's why i recommend spending the extra money on the ones with the hinge the suitcase style they do make the job a little bit easier now you're gonna pay some decent money for high quality panels and in future videos i'll show you some cheaper

8:16 alternatives but if you're looking for a real high quality setup this is one of the best ones that i've seen you can also get portable panels these portable panels are lightweight they fold up and this one that we're looking at here is actually the same wattage as this panel here so its

8:39 shape is in a linear shape instead of a uh like a big square shape but these panels are capable of getting just as good a charge as one of these panels they do require that you hang them up from hooks off the side of your camper or lean them up against the cooler or something like that so for that reason

9:00 most people see lesser or lower performance out of these panels than they do out of the fixed glass panels obviously the advantage of these panels are that when they fold up they're extremely lightweight and they're very easy to store no matter what system we're comparing the pros and cons for here ultimately

9:24 the best system is one that's going to incorporate a little bit of all of these maybe a little thick solar a little portable solar some glass and fold up this gives us the adaptability to have the best outcome in any situation one little side benefit from these is they come with their own small charge

9:46 controller that can handle usb so i can plug my cell phone my head lamp camera gear directly into this solar panel most of these larger solar panels require the charge controller to be able to do that the last type of portable panel is a hybrid panel and i think i just kind of made that up um basically what it is is

10:10 it's a mix between the fix panel and the portable panel goal zero makes one called a ranger i think they only sell it in a 300 watt size but jackery makes those very thin ones that snap up with magnets those panels are good but what i tend to find is that they don't do either thing as well you know when

10:29 they're trying to be in the middle they don't collect as much sun as these and they're not nearly as durable a lot more of those panels get broken than these style of durable panels they're also not as flexible as these panels so when you're packing them away they are heavier and they take up more space so

10:49 there's a panel out there for everyone but i just also wanted to include those new panels that are somewhere in between these so for this demonstration we've zeroed in on 100 watt glass panel it's suitcase style and it folds up we also selected 100 amp hour agm the next thing we need is a charge

11:11 controller now this is the brains of the operation this is actually what's going to charge the battery it just harvests the energy that the panel is producing and converts it into a charge profile now there are a lot of things to consider when you're going with the charge controller and a lot of the

11:28 information that i'm finding on the internet is about very advanced systems tons of wattage on the solar panels wired in series multiple lithium iron phosphate batteries it's hard to sift through all of this information which is really talking about like teslas when most of us are talking about priuses so if 99 of

11:53 the systems on the market are 100 watts or maybe 200 watts for an rv we're going to talk about a lot more practical approach to selecting your charge controller so a pwm charge controller is an older technology but it does a really really good job in a specific application it just so happens that that specific

12:17 application is what 90 some percent of rvers use when they go to solar now a lot of the content that i find online talks about mppt charge controllers being the only option now this is usually specific to very advanced applications larger solar arrays arrays wired in series and certain areas

12:43 that get a lot of clouds like the pacific northwest and mppt does better in all of those applications but if you drive around the country and look at the type of solar that most people are using with their campers it's 100 or 200 watts wired in parallel when i test pwm charge controllers against mppt and those

13:08 situations they perform almost as well this one was 50 bucks this one was like 79 bucks and it comes with all of the connectors needed to plug into the solar panels the mppt charge controllers are considerably more money and you can't find them waterproof there are a few on the markets that are

13:32 big money but most of them have to be installed inside your camper or inside an enclosure these waterproof pwms can go with a suction cup up against the camper you can put a bungee cord around them put them around your battery box they're made to be out in the weather that's a huge advantage for a lot of us

13:56 so before you write me with your complaints about this comparison i realize that a mppt is a superior charge controller it's what i use for more complex systems but when you're talking about these smaller systems save your money and go with the pwm you can actually buy a second one because these

14:16 things don't last forever so this one was 50 bucks i like to use one that's about 70 to 100 but you can find ones that are even cheaper than this to have a backup when you're camping it's a better option for most people and because it's raining out right now i better put my mppt away

14:36 so up next we're going to talk about sizing the system now i know this video is probably going to run long and i know that some people aren't going to be interested in watching a video of this lane but that sizing the system is the most important thing it's what people have to pay someone like me to do for

14:54 you and it's very very simple so if you learn how to appropriately size your panels you're going to be able to set up solar on any camper that you're working with or make changes or upgrade the current system that you have now the last thing that we're talking about before we get into that is

15:12 connectors and i think i'll do those in a separate video when i'm installing these but it's going to require occasionally for you to work with fork style connectors occasionally you'll have to work with mc4 a very popular connector for solar panels some of them require sae which is really

15:35 popular on the kit style that plug into the solar on the side and some of these new ones these new panels that are made to go with uh portable power stations or charge controllers are going to work with anderson power poles like this one here or if you can come around the side they'll

15:57 work with eight millimeter eight millimeter barrel plugs that comes in both male and female so there's a lot of different connectors out there but it doesn't have to confuse you it really is simple stuff so when we start installing these in upcoming videos we'll show you which plugs to use

16:16 for which situations okay are you still with me if you are this is the most important part of the whole thing i saved it to last for the people with the attention span for you to be able to size solar setups for your camper it's going to start with your battery we talked about having a

16:35 three day run time when you're not connected now once you have that it's helpful to understand how much solar you need to be able to do this you basically have to be able to do third grade math so i'm going to show you the formula to make this really easy so welcome to my third grade classroom

16:56 the math that we need to know to be able to size these systems is that watts equals volts times amps since we're working with 12 volt systems on these rvs we need to find out the amps to determine the watts or we need to find out the watts to determine the amps so in the case of having 100

17:21 amp hour battery we know that we have a 1200 watt reserve capacity it's as simple as this because it's lead acid we know that it's actually a 600 watt capacity because that we can only use half of the battery's capacity so this math is going to help us

17:46 determine what we need to know it also is true if you rearrange this that amps equals watts divided by volts so if you're looking for the amperage of something like a solar panel and it's a 120 watt solar panel on a 12 volt system we know that it's a 10 amp charge

18:11 controller that we need or that this setup is a 10 amp setup so this simple math can be used whether we have advanced systems or simple systems to be able to size these components together better so for this demonstration we used a 100 amp hour agm that's a 1200 watt hour agm now we know that we can only use 50 of

18:37 capacity on lead acid so we have a 600 watt working capacity this is useful information when we're talking about panels the thing about panels is that one of the secrets is you can multiply them by 3.5 to figure out the average amount of wattage you'll get in a day it's an average

18:59 sometimes it's going to be more sometimes it's going to be less so it's important to realize that 100 times 3.5 is a 350 watt per day panel now the way we get this formula is that panels are about 70 percent efficient they have to be rated that way because if i took this panel and brought

19:21 it to the equator on a mountain it might go to full rating this hundred watt panel might get a hundred watts that's how we have to engineer these but if you live anywhere in the continental u.s this hundred watt panel is not going to get you 100 watts and if it is it's very very rare so the more useful figure

19:46 is 70 times 5 hours of average daylight that's the same as multiplying it by 3.5 so we have a 100 watt panel that's a 350 watt per day panel we have a 200 watt panel that's a 700 watt per day panel so if we have 600 usable watts in our battery we know that a 350 watt panel will

20:14 probably recover us on most average days remember i told you you should be able to go three days so 600 watts for three days is 200 watts a day so 350 watts per day is going to fill you back up now 200 watt panel over here that brings in 700 watts a day now that's an overkill panel that's actually oversized

20:41 to the battery you still might take advantage of using a 200 watt panel and the reason why is because in real world situations you might want to pack this up when you're not around camp you might have it out for a few hours in the morning before you take off to go sightseeing it's a valuable thing to

21:03 have it oversized but i wouldn't go any bigger than this because you're going to come up against the limits of how much charge you can put into your lead acid battery anyway so this is how we size things we convert our battery to watts and we take our panels and we multiply them by

21:22 3.5 and think of a daily charge a 50 watt panel is going to get 150 watt per day charge that's how we do the conversion now finding a charge controller is even easier just divide it by the 12 volts so if you have a 100 watt panel you know that a 10 amp charge controller can handle 120 watts

21:47 if you have a 20 amp charge controller it can handle 240 watts so that simple math is how you size these things together i hope this stuff was helpful i know this isn't the most interesting information in the world but if you learn this stuff all of the future videos that we'll do about installing

22:08 solar will make a lot more sense if you want to modify adjust or improve your current solar system this is the sort of math and industry secrets that allow you to do this so i hope you check out my other videos i'll be putting out a ton of content on solar thank you so much for watching ask me a question in the

22:29 comments and i'll see you next time [Music]