Batteries / Electrical

RV Solar Series: Installation of the panels is the easiest part aspect of installing a solar battery charger on your RV. My panels are installed on a fiberglass roof — your roofing materials and desires will change your installation techniques. Running wires from the panels to the location near the battery is the hardest part

RV Solar Series: How to Design a Just – Right – System. A just-right size, not too small, not too costly. Sounds like Goldilocks. Just right. Start with simple and work to more complex.   Start with a battery.   Add to that a positive and negative wire that leads to a small solar collector. Connect

RV Solar Series: How much solar did we need? My answer was 600-700 watts of solar installed flat, (700 installed) to recharge our battery and live daily. Given six hours of sunshine, (winter) assuming the batteries were not overly discharged we should be good. Part of the assumption was that you can’t always count on

RV Solar Series: How we Store Electricity is a key consideration, almost all RVs have some kind of central battery. We wish we had the best battery. Nearly all RV manufacturers put the lowest cost battery in an RV, just to give it the minimum. Thankfully when we purchased our RV, the original battery had

RV Solar Series: Quit wasting electricity. Turn it off, make it better. Measure to know where it goes. Change your location. Turn it off One of the things I first encountered before measuring my energy use was that I had no way to completely disconnect the battery from loads. There was a switch in the

Electricity – 101 RV Solar Series: Understanding Electricity is not optional but is not a concern in everyday modern life. What is electricity? Before you make a change to your RV electric system, you better understand at least the very basics of electricity. When you turn on a flashlight, you create a circuit.  The components

Measure to know RV Solar Series: How to know what just-right means. How to know what just-right means in an RV solar system design. The answer is you have to measure to know what you need. How do you measure to determine what your needs are? This is a key step. Lots of folks put

RV Solar Series: Introduction “Boon-docking” or “dry-camping” is an RV style that refers to camping in an RV without the attachment of electrical, water, and sewer hookups.  We bring our own generator to make electricity, sometimes campground rules restrict generator operation hours. The most restrictive generator hours we encountered were at Death Valley National Park