Full solar

[scubalineman]

I have a 43 ft 2012 4014c and I'm wanting to go full solar and wanted to see if anyone had an idea how many 400w panels I would need as well as what size inverter etc

 

[cipwood]

What do you mean by full solar? A/C needs a lot. I have 700 watts on 300ah lifepo4 battery and a 3000 watt inverter and it's only good for maybe 1 1/2 hours. It's not all about panel watts it's also battery amp hours.

 

[CPJeff]

+1 on cipwood...So many variables to consider. First and foremost (imho) is what is your budget? Going "full solar" to support multiple AC along with the other loads for any decent length of time can easily run into several thousands, or even more depending on brands. There are many ways to reduce costs if you are tech-savvy enough, but its easy to go off into the weeds on building your own battery banks and BMS's. Next thing would be roof real estate available. 400W panels are big and heavy, so there's that too. I could recommend some web sites that are great resources for estimating panels, inverters, batteries, but being new to the HL family, I won't post direct links here. Not trying to scare you off, but good planning ahead of time will save tons of headaches and wasted $$ in the future.

 

[david-steph2018]

I have a 43 ft 2012 4014c and I'm wanting to go full solar and wanted to see if anyone had an idea how many 400w panels I would need as well as what size inverter etc

September 2022, we had a full rig solar added to the Road Warrior. We have 8-200-watt panels on the roof, 2-3KW inverters, 8-120AH Elevation batteries. Plus, the needed equipment for the solar. The inverters are wired as one to each leg in the breaker box. We can run 2-A/C units at once and have done that. But the cost was expensive for the setup.
Our system was installed by Solar Energy System in Nappanee, Ind... The shop is about 1 1/2-miles from the Newmar shop in Nappanee.
We will find out if the total investment was worth the cost here soon.

 

[taskswap]

It also depends when and where you want to use it. I have 1200W on the roof of our Milestone and that meets our needs for just about everything except A/C. But for perspective, I just got back from a week-long trip with my truck camper in the mountains of Colorado. It has 400W on the roof and a 100Ah battery. About half the days that was all I needed. But two days were very cold so I needed my backup generator a few hours a day because the furnace takes like 7A while running (for the blower) and it was running every 20 minutes or so. And one day it snowed and I ran the generator almost 36 hours straight.

Don't forget to account for "situation" with solar as well. In a flat gravel park in Texas you might never have anything overhead. But even a small amount of shading from a small tree can cause a huge loss in solar input. Check out these two images below from my Chargepoint controller. They were taken 10 minutes apart. I was surprised by the low voltage and had gone up on the roof to check for any issues. There was a small amount of snow (about the size of a hand-print) blown onto a corner of one panel. That's all it took to cut its output in HALF. These kinds of things can affect your solar input needs.

Will there be shading? Will you tilt your panels? What direction will you park? What do you need to run?

It can be more of an art than a science sometimes but the more you share about what your needs are the more folks can help.

 

[Alan Schneider]

I have a 43 ft 2012 4014c and I'm wanting to go full solar and wanted to see if anyone had an idea how many 400w panels I would need as well as what size inverter etc

I have a 2021 Big Horn 3300DL that my wife and I purchased new. I wanted to be able to camp off grid at times so here is what I did. I installed 6 BattleBorn 100 amp hour batteries, a Victron Multi-Plus II (12v), a Victron Orion DC to DC charger, (6) 200 watt (24v) solar panels, Victron MPPT 250/70 Solar Controler, 500 amp smart shunt, Victron Cerbo, and Touch GX Kit to monitor and control things with. The system allows me to run my Refrigerator, Fans, Microwave, TV's, One of the two A/C units, etc. Note: I had a soft start put into each of the two A/C Heat Pumps that I have. All that being said, The question you might ask is what do you want to run and for how long. When we are towing we run the residential refrigerator only. The DC to DC charger and Solar panels keep the battery bank fully charged much of the time. When camping we can run most things when we want. We can make coffee, watch TV, listen to the radio, Use the microwave, charge phones and computers, etc. Our Battery bank can do all of that no problem. We only run one A/C unit in the bedroom for about 15 minutes at night to cool things down before going to sleep. We don't have a generator to provide additional power if we need/want to continuously run the A/C. I think that the system we have will allow us to boondock for 3-4 days with out a problem. Our off grid experience is limited. We had this system installed last year. We had an electrical problem develop while on the road. We took our rig back to have it diagnosed and repaired. It turned out that the junction box under a slide had a short. Moving the slide in and out shifted the wires in the box and created a short. NOTE: a Wire nut was not put on the twisted join of wires in the junction box and over time the wires shifted position in the box and created a short. That is fixed now. We really like the system we had installed. If you are going to install a solar system, seriously consider a few things. 1. what do you want to run? 2. How long will you need to run the system? 3. How much money are you willing to spend? If we discover that we really love boondocking I would like to add another 6 solar pannels and make our battery bank larger.

 

[david-steph2018]

I have a 43 ft 2012 4014c and I'm wanting to go full solar and wanted to see if anyone had an idea how many 400w panels I would need as well as what size inverter etc

Do you have an update on this? Have you installed your solar and has does it work for you?