A solar power setup suitable for refrigerator use requires several devices in addition to solar panels.
How many solar panels for a fridge.
The average refrigerator found in the united states uses approximately 57 kwh per month while the average freezer uses 58 kwh for a combined total of 115 kwh.
You multiply the combined wattage of the solar panels by the number of hours sunlight they will receive per day.
The need to run solar systems to power a residential refrigerator in rvs started a whole line of larger arrays solar kits.
How many solar panels do i need to power my television.
Now as the manufacturers are using more efficient refrigerators the size of that array required may go down as low as 570.
Batteries are needed to store the power that the refrigerator will use at night or when clouds block the sun.
300 times 4 is 1200 watts.
Divide that by 30 kwh per month per solar panel and you get 3 8 solar panels.
View larger image keep in mind that solar panels with a higher wattage rating will produce kwh at a quicker rate meaning you would need less of them to reach your kwh per month threshold.
This is far more than the 22ah we need to charge a depleted battery.
Let s look at a few other examples.
So we used a whole bunch of confusing math and figured everything out.
1200 watts divided by 1 000 equals 1 2 kwh produced per day.
For this system you would need seven 75 watt solar panels and four 300 amp hour batteries.
Now as i said before this is a high power example more typical of a large offgrid caravan or motorhome but the approach is the same.
We set up the solar panels which we procured from windy nation.
So you are going to need a total wattage of 300 combined solar panels.
Roughly our fridge draws 1 3 amps per hour.
If we assume that each solar panel will average about 75 percent of four hours of direct sunlight each day it would take about three solar panels to power a fridge.
A good rule of thumb is 4 hours.
To work out the size of the panel we need we simply take the 28 45 x 18v average voltage of a solar panel 512w.
I harvest up to 8kwh per day with these panels.
I use eight 225watt monocrystalline panels to power my home and by extension the refrigerator.
If you were using 200 watt panels you would need only three panels and four 300 amp batteries.
So at 6 65 amps for 8 hours a 120w solar panel can potentially deliver 53 2ah of chargeback into our battery 6 65amps x 8hours 53 2ah.
Which when you consider the solar setup draws about 5 amps per hour total we have a decent amount of amps per hour leftover to do with what we please.
Always round this off to the higher number.
How did i come up with 300.
When the rvs first started to integrate residential fridges these systems were around a kilowatt.