I recently went camping with a dozen of my neighbors up to northern az out next to a lake.
Camping solar panel refrigerator diy.
Your solar panel needs to have enough power to replenish that usage using only the sun it can which is about 5 hours per day more in cloudy places.
Now as the manufacturers are using more efficient refrigerators the size of that array required may go down as low as 570 watts.
We ve installed the combiner box on the roof gaining access to an inconspicuous location inside the rv.
We ve connected the solar panels to the combiner box ran wire inside the rv to the location we are going to mount the solar.
24 hours a day we have refrigerated food and it is damn glorious.
But generally they work on the same principles.
Remove the residential refrigerator and replace it with a 3 way refrigerator that uses propane gas then design a system that can operate most everything in your rv while boondocking except the refrigerator and ac unit.
Basically any fridge will do but the more energy efficient means a smaller solar setup is needed.
Whynter fm 85g 85 quart portable fridge ac 110v dc 12v true freezer for car home camping rv 8 f to 50 f one size gray 4 3 out of 5 stars 113 659 99 659.
5 hours of direct sunlight x 6 amps generated hour 30 amp hours day.
When the rvs first started to integrate residential fridges these systems were around a kilowatt.
Currently as we speak our self installed rv solar panels are completely running our new refrigerator.
Remember back when we decided to rip out our rv refrigerator because it kicked the bucket and lived out of a cooler for a year.
How the solar refrigerator exactly works depends on the type it is.
Your charge controller needs to be efficient and be able to handle the power it s given.
The need to run solar systems to power a residential refrigerator in rvs started a whole line of larger arrays solar kits.
In this video i show you the build of my little portable solar generator it consists of a 100 watt solar panel two 35 ah batteries a 400 watt inverter.
Diy solar off grid rv power rv solar.
There are the rare dc powered refrigerators that are actually more efficient than the inverter types.
100 watt portable solar panel.
4 batteries and 3 panels would probably do.
The photovoltaic cells then convert the solar energy into electricity which is later stored in a battery.
Well folks those days are long behind us.
100 watt solar panel approximately 6 amps hour in direct summer sun no clouds here s an example of our calculation of how much the solar panels are generating to recharge our rv batteries.
