How do Solar panels for Motorhome work? 7 Things

Recreational vehicles need external power to operate the living area, kitchen area and the outside area at night when camping. Many motorhome camping sites are equipped with electricity plug.

However, when going camping in the forest or the interior it would need another source of power to light your recreational vehicle. In this case, we have only two options that can work in the place of electricity.

Power Generator
Solar panels

Power generators are known to many as the traditional backups. They use engines powered by fossil oil to generate electric power. Generators produce AC power at a go, equivalent to the power of electricity.

Solar panels in the hand arrest light rays from the sun and store in batteries in the form of DC (which is not directly usable by many appliances). The good thing about it is that its power is steady and can be used for a long time.

How solar panels will work on the Motorhome?

Being the better option when compared to fuel generators, solar panels will work well only if they are placed well, all the required equipment’s placed and well maintained. If all that is not followed this renewable system will fail.

Remember, even though the maintenance costs are very low, the initial investment is very high so you will have to get value for your money.

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The things you will need in your motorhome renewable energy system is first a solar panel, cables, a charge controller, batteries, power inverter, and a breaker box. If you get a qualified technician, they will advise you on what you need and help you fix properly. To know details, Consider a visit to rvside.com.

With all this, how exactly do solar panels for Motorhome’s work?

1. Solar panel

Panels are placed on the roof of your motorhome. When sunlight is received by the solar panel it is instantly changed to electric current. You can have a belt of panels, which are connected to each other by it conductors and wired to a charge controller.

2. Charge controller

As mentioned above, the power from your solar panel passes through a controller before it reaches your batteries. Its work is to protect your batteries from overcharging. The reason behind this is so that the power does not destroy your batteries.

3. Batteries

This is a very important part of a renewable energy system. Batteries store energy for use when we do not have sunlight. The batteries will store power depending on the storage capacity so you should have a bigger capacity for better storage. This will push you more into the night.

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4. DC use

You can choose to use the energy in the form of DC if the appliances you have fitted in the Motorhome consume 72V DC energy. However, this is not common and therefore we have to invert.

5. Power inverter

The power inverter is a device used to change power from direct current to alternating current (electric energy form) which is used by many machines including heating equipment.

6. Breaker box

From the inverter power is fed into a breaker box which will protect the Motorhome from power surges and houses circuit breakers to assist when there is a fault.