Planning for a fulltime RV retirement, I have been looking into solar for mobile installations on a Class A/School bus. YOU CANNOT get enough panels on an RV and enough batteries IN an RV to reliably supply 100% on your energy needs. Which means you still need a generator to top off the batteries when you hit a stretch of “poor solar” days/locations. AND the cost of the panels and associated gear is prohibitively high.
Solar is an out-and-out scam.
Good luck with your nomad retirement. I would love to, but the wife ain't havin' any.
I follow a number of RV channels, and there are a lot of ways to fill your full energy budget, though only a very, very few doing 100% with solar. Will Prowse's channel probably has the best reviews of solar equipment, though not so much RV based any more. "Blue van Dan" is doing a bus build. Lots of others....
” YOU CANNOT get enough panels on an RV and enough batteries IN an RV to reliably supply 100% on your energy needs. Which means you still need a generator to top off the batteries when you hit a stretch of “poor solar” days/locations.”
Very true. Another consideration is that not every campground, particularly campgrounds without hookups (where you need solar), has a great view of the sky. As we say in the solar business “One tree can ruin your whole day”.
And if you want air conditioning with solar on a camper, forget it. The best you’ll do is a being able to run it for an hour or so (off batteries), to cool the rig down before coming back to it.
Last summer I took a 12v refrigerator with me camping, and planned to use a 150 watt panel to charge up the power pod during the day.
If it was a sunny day and I set everything up by 10am, I could recharge the battery by late afternoon. If it was cloudy, hardly worth the effort to set up for less than a 50 watt output.
It works, but without a large battery backup you’re on thin ice.