How Many Watt Solar Panel Do I Need For My Caravan

Wattage rating x hours of daylight sunshine total watts per day.

How many watt solar panel do i need for my caravan.

If a 100w caravan solar panel produces approximately 4 5a per hour in bright sunshine. 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. Our final personal determination. Find out which solar panel you need for reference to keep your caravan and motorhome battery topped up while on site you would need at least a 40w panel to achieve this.

For our specific power demands we need one 100 watt portable solar panel to recharge our rv batteries during our boondocking camping trips under normal conditions. A battery holds about 100ah x 12 8 volts 1280 watts of power roughly. For any given energy production target you need fewer panels if their individual wattage is higher. To estimate charge created multiply this figure by the hours of daylight sunshine exposure.

Running additional electrical devices such as microwaves and laptops will add further strain. 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. Using the above example of 170ah it needs to produce 28 45 amps per hour for 6 hours. Panel specifications the power rating of panels varies depending on the model and manufacturer but most range from 250 watts to 330 watts.

From here we can determine that two of these 100 watt panels would give us about 65 16 amp hours a day which covers our requirement of 50 amp hours. 100 amp hours of useable power from a battery contains roughly 1280 watts of power 100ah x 12 8 volts 1280 watts of power the average hours of sunlight per day in the continental us is 6 hours. If you have a 200a h battery this will take approximately. Therefore you will need to choose a solar panel which can provide 55ah of power per day.

As battery capacity is measured in a h amp hours you need to know the solar panel current to estimate how quickly it will charge your battery for example. Our two 100 watt solar panels equal 200 watts together which also checks out with our guideline of matching our battery amp hours with our solar panel wattage. When roof size is limited efficient panels with a high wattage can make the system more compact.