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Step one in getting started is determining how many kiloWatts and kiloWatt hours you want to produce to power your project. Do you want to have solar backup in case of power outage to run the bare essentials? Do you plan to live ‘off-grid’ entirely? Are you interested in powering a garage or shed so you don’t have to tie it to your main house grid? Does the solar project need to fit on top of your RV?
Once you have decided your general scope, you can determine how many kiloWatts per hour and per day the equipment and appliances you want to power actually use. Checking the sticker on the appliances can give you a rough idea, but for example a 750 Watt fridge only pulls that much on max power. You would need to check some type of power meter, preferably an individual appliance meter that goes between the appliance and the wall, to see how much it uses during an average day.
Then, to convert your average usage to how many solar panels and batteries you will need, you would add a buffer to account for cloudy and rainy days. We recommend adding 50% so that you can also charge your batteries to use when there is insufficient sunlight. So if you needed 10 kW per hour during your peak hours, you would aim for 15 kW of solar panels. Since you would naturally want to avoid running solar powered things at night, you could estimate running less off battery power, and could do ¾ or ⅔ of the capacity of your panels in batteries. In our example, you would need between 10 and 12 kWhours of total battery capacity.
To complete your project, divide the total wattage by the wattage of the panels you choose and count the number of connections and splitters you will need. You will need a charge controller that can handle the capacity of each group of panels to charge your batteries, and inverters to bring the power from the batteries to the appliances.
Solar Calculator
Our New Improved Load Calculator is here for our customer ease.
