Thread: solar 4 our AS
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Old 07-04-2003, 12:08 AM   #4
RoadKingMoe
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Profile:  2001 34' Limited
Beavercreek , Ohio
Posts: 1,581

If $70 satellite dish setups disappear, what will a $500 panel and $200 controller do? Sprout legs... or wings. Those are pretty good sized glass kites if not tied down well. Look at it this way... how many holes do you already have in the roof for rivets.

On a good day, one flat-mounted Kyocera 120W panel will produce 20-30AH per day, depending on time of year and latitude. A tilted panel will do a little better, particularly in the winter.

Your profile doesn't say anything about your Airstream, but a newer trailer with circuit boards for gas water heater use, gas refrigerator use, and LP detector, as well as a 1A gas solenoid that's on when the refrigerator burner is, and a radio that uses about 1/4A to remember its station settings, can take 25AH per day.

Since you can't park in the shade any more with solar, you may need to run a Fantastic Vent anywhere from low (2A) to high (3A) for maybe 10 hours a day (20-30AH) to get rid of the solar heat that builds up in the trailer. Of course if you camp in the desert there's no shade anyway, so the KC120 will at least take care of daily fan use.

Or when the evenings are cool, it should power a 7.5A furnace running 1/3 duty cycle for 10 hours.

One 2.8A incandescent light for 5 hours is 14AH, 10 minutes of 6A water pump is another 1AH, a couple of hours of a little 50W TV on an inverter brings that up to 25AH (we didn't count the antenna amplifier, or a DVD or VCR).

Looks like you need about 2-3 of those panels depending on how electronic your trailer is. And that's just to cover one day's use, so you'll still need a generator for recovery from one or more rainy days.
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The Long, LONG Trailer
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