Lots of RV manufacturer is converting to solar that can fully power AC/microwave etc (drain one night charge in morning). Unless you are camping in Colorado where its cold at night, you cant rely on battery to use on AC/Microwave, i think it will kill the battery life in a hurry, I would still prefer generator for high wattage like AC/Microwave and have small battery bank/solar to run my fridge/radio/tv/lights.
Edit: Will probably work with weekend campers - i usually do weeks or months at a time out.
I would never rely solely on solar to power my rig, always need to have a generator capable of carrying ALL the load the trailer can use, including the outlets, AC, Microwave, water heater and fridge. I do think using the AC on battery power overnight would be viable so you wouldn’t have to run the generator. I have 550 watts of solar on my trailers roof, the math says that‘s 38 amps, but I’ve never seen it that high, I think 20 amps is the highest I’ve seen on the controller screen, so, if one was to want to really use solar for their rig during sunny days, 1100 watts or there abouts would be necessary, easy to do on the roof of a RV, and probably 400 ah’s of LiFePO4 batteries, easy in my rig as I have four Trojan T-105 6 volt batteries now, what a weight savings and a hug boost in stored energy that would be, In addition one would need a proper battery charger for those batteries when running on the generator or shore power which would be 1440 watts 12A @120VAC if you were charging each battery with a 25 A charger and from my experience with my trolling motor batteries would take 3.5 hours to re charge them from an 80% discharge.
The 400ah battery bank would give you 21 hours of run time on the AC @15amps at a 80% discharge on the batteries, and that is continuous running, and AC’s typically don’t run at 100% duty cycle unless it is really really hot, so at a 50% duty cycle you’d have 42 hours of run time.
I set my rig up to dry camp for extended periods of time, ceramic wool heater=way less fuel and battery usage, insulated the under side ( mine didn’t come that way from the factory). If I was out hunting or fishing in the early or late part of the season I didn’t want to have to leave if I got a late or early snow storm. I don’t have an inverter to run my AC appliances currently, but it sure would be nice to have it set up that way, the trick would be making sure the inverter is off line whenever the generator is running or hooked up to shore power, easy I’m sure. For the foreseeable future I can see replacing the four T-105’s with two 100ah LiFePO4 batteries and I’d have way more storage and usable energy than those four lead acid batteries do.
battlebornbatteries.com
