Do Solar Panels Work When It's Cloudy? | Solar in Seattle
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- Опубліковано 11 лют 2025
- We're Joel & Emma, living full time in our Escape E23 travel trailer with our two pups, Samantha & Colt. Subscribe and hit the notification bell to follow along as we adventure in our cozy living machine! 🔔
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Really enjoy your videos 👍
Great video as usual ! 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Thanks!! 😊
You are great, you should be admired as you do all this good luck my friend🤜🤛
Thank you!! 🙏
Thanks for sharing this information. I will get my 29V in June, and I'm intensely interested in how much I'll get from my 190W solar panel. Your news is encouraging.
Exciting!! And depending on how you use your new rig, that 190W may be more than enough for you! It’s nice that you can drive off the lot and immediately start using your new home on wheels, and thankfully there’s even an inverter built in!
Great overview; and correct when it comes to a light overcast. You can actually have even distribution of light .
Isn’t that great?!
Did I hear you right? You have lithium and the stock house batteries both powering your RV? Do you have plans to make it 100% lithium and maybe adding an extra alternater that will charge them? Curious.
Yes, sir! And we do indeed have both systems! The existing house batteries that came with our rig are terrible, so we're going to run these dead before upgrading them to lithium as well. Then I am thinking we'll set up a DC to DC charger to go both ways instead of just our converter charging from the existing lithiums to the non-lithium house batteries as it is now. I never thought about a second alternator, but that isn't a bad idea! I know there's an alternator option (or used to be) for the Econoline chassis, so that has crossed my mind, but I've also been considering wind generators as well. I don't think they're terribly efficient overall, but I'm always exploring alternatives for night charging and such!
Regarding the AC, I guess that when you want to run it, it will generally be the longer and sunnier days anyway.....and if it is overcast then that will cool things off somewhat......almost like a win win situation :)
Exactly! We’re considering whether we want to take one of them out and install a better fan for better airflow in general. I guess we’ll see this summer how it does!
I really enjoy your videos! I too am an IT engineer. I have a RV newbie question: If my RV only has a 30amp service instead of a 50amp service, what part, if any, does that play with how many appliances/laptops I can run using solar? Does the smaller service constrict solar in any way?
Thanks again for great videos!
Thanks! And that's great! Are you able to work remotely also?! And technically, that's a limitation for certain. In my experience, that generally has most to do with the air conditioning. So a 30 amp unit will generally run a single AC and a 50 amp will be able to run two, just because of their very high power draw. In our coach, we have a fancy system that automatically disables certain functions when the power draw gets too high. So we can run both ACs and the fridge, but when we start the microwave it will shut off the rear AC and resume once the draw from the microwave finishes! I will say, I've never reached the limit of 30A service, but some bigger rigs have much more power hungry appliances! Air conditioning units are becoming more efficient so this is less of an issue than it has been in the past especially! As for solar, no effect! Most people hook their panels up to the built in batteries, and may upgrade those to lithiums for better capacity and all of the other benefits. That will run all 12V appliances without issues, and then your inverter that takes the 12V and turns it into 110/120V is really the limiting factor there. We have a 3000W inverter which can supply around 30A to our entire coach, so we can run everything without issue! If you have a smaller inverter (1000W-2000W) you just have to limit how much you run at once before you hit the limit and the unit shuts down. Laptops are pretty efficient though, and we have absolutely no problem running 4 or more at the same time, with everything else running (TV, fridge, AC, etc)
I hope that's helpful!
@@CozyLivingMachine Yes, I'm currently 100% remote. I'm a Sr. Software Engineer at a large bank. We will be purchasing a Class-C RV soon and then RV full time and work from the RV. So then if I understand correctly, my ability to run appliances/laptops solely from solar has no dependency on whether my service is 30 or 50 amp. Is that a correct assumption? In watching a few of your videos, it seems that the number of items we can run at the same time depends on how beefy the solar setup is. The more lithium batteries, the more solar panels, the better the charge controller / inverter the more appliances you can run and also can run for a longer time. Is that correct? Our goal is to have redundant internet solutions and a solar system capable of allowing us to boondock anywhere we choose. I hope my assumptions are correct. I'll take any tips/tricks you can provide! Again, thank you very much for your reply and keep making great videos!
That's fantastic! So many options out there right now, so that's great also.
That is correct. For the most part, class Cs come with 30A service, and some larger trailers and class As may have 50A. But absolutely, 6 years of having only 30A (other than 1 trailer) I have never found a single thing that I couldn't run on 30A service!
And as for how much you can run and all that, basically this depends on your batteries. If you have more power in your batteries, you can run much more for much longer! So if I have 600Ah of batteries, and I have a device that takes 1 amp per hour, I can run that item for 600 hours. Or 3 amps, would give me 200 hours. Most routers and such take very little power, and my MacBook Pro takes 87W (87W/12V=7.25A). So If I'm only running my Mac off of my batteries, it can run for 82.75 hours without recharging.
That's when the solar panels come in, the more panels you have (and the better the sun exposure, of course), the faster your batteries can recharge. We have 1200W of panels, and of course they rarely ever get that full amount of power, but generally if we have good sun, with everything that we run overnight, the battery power isn't affected much at all and it doesn't take long before our batteries are topped right back up, leaving us with excess power that we can draw from our batteries and immediately refill with solar during the day, if that makes sense! Panels are cheap, batteries are the biggest expense, I'd say!
As for a charge controller, everyone has different opinions on this, but I wanted to keep it very simple and got the Victron Solar 150V | 100A charge controller. This just takes the crazy voltage/amperage from the solar panels and converts it into something that the batteries can accept (for our batteries, it shoots for 14.8V while charging, and then as many amps as it can feed to recharge quickly). You don't have to go with a Victron product, but that was worth the money for us (ours was around $750, that's almost the cost of a battery!)
And then the last part is the inverter. We wired directly up to our distribution panel, similar to how the regular plug is wired in, or the generator. We have a 3000W inverter, which gives us around a full 30A of service. Granted, we never even come close to requiring the full 3000W (or 30A) of power from our inverter, but it's great to know that this can handle a larger power load if we require it.
I would say that this is a great layout for what you can run and what you require to run it: www.mobile-solarpower.com He understands budgets and such, and keeps it pretty easy!
This link is also invaluable if you're doing the work yourself: ua-cam.com/video/JW0vrTAa50s/v-deo.html
I can give you our setup and configuration, but my general thinking is this: buy as much solar panels as you can fit, it's cheap, easy to install, and you'll never want less. Get the inverter next, then buy as much batteries as you can afford. You can always upgrade any of these components (except solar panels, those are a pain to reinstall!), so I wouldn't worry too much about "getting it wrong" or not having the best gear initially, especially if you get it close! And if you have a limited budget and can't afford lithiums, no worries there. You can always upgrade later!
@@CozyLivingMachine Thank you so very much for your reply and your generous tips/tricks!
The list below is what our initial research revealed as to a 'beefy' solar setup. I wish to go big first and try to future proof; something that will hopefully last us many years before needing to upgrade anything.
Please let me know if you see any issues with this system or if something will not work or is not needed. I didn't come up with these items on my own, they were suggested to me from another source, but I wanted your feedback since you use solar seemingly everyday!
Victron Multiplus-2 Inverter/Charger
Victron LYNX Shunt VE.Can Power Distribution System
Type CNN Fuse for Victron LYNX Shunt
Victron LYNX Distributor Power Distribution System
Victron Cerbo GX System Controller
Victron GX Touch 50 & 70 Touch Display for Cerbo GX
Victron SmartSolar MPPT 150/70 Charge Controller up to 250/100 VE.Can
Victron Energy Smart Battery Sense
3 x 100Ah 12V GC2 deep cycle LiFePO4 Battleborn Batteries
6 x 200 Watt 12 Volt Renogy Monocrystalline Solar Panels
Happy to help!
That system is significantly more "intelligent" than mine! I don't use the Multiplus or the Lynx system just because I wanted to keep things as simple as possible (for us, it's a WHEN things break, not an IF 😂) The Victron gear is very, very nice, but also equally as expensive. The Inverter/Charger didn't appeal to me initially only because we have never once plugged in to a regular plug with this rig, and the amount of times we have that opportunity is maybe 1/365 days, so we didn't care about the charger component and figured that the built-in unit that came with our rigs is adequate! I would personally upgrade that charge controller just so that it can handle a little more amperage (the 150|70 can do 150 volts and 70 amps, which we can easily reach with our 1200W on a good day). We chose to separate everything out, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with going with the Victron gear. Our inverter ran us around $350 or so for the $3kW. We don't have as much monitoring or anything outside of our Victron charge controller app, but that's okay with me. We don't necessarily need to see historical records of solar input and energy drain, I just want to be sure it's working when I need it (and it does!)
For the panels, I would select 6x: www.amazon.com/Newpowa-Monocrystalline-Efficiency-Module-Marine/dp/B07VBL7XKV/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=200+watt+solar+panel&qid=1651170849&sprefix=200+wa%2Caps%2C348&sr=8-5 would be my suggestion, and they're likely the exact same panels, just without the Renogy name. The one factory does a ton of these, and Renogy just happens to be a name people like. I've learned that it means nothing in this case. Our panels are HQST, but identical to the other Renogy units we compared to and returned! I refuse to pay for the name, and I'm sure that you can find an even better deal that this. If you are able, I may suggest purchasing your unit and measuring first prior to ordering. That's why we went with the 100W panels, just to have a little flexibility in how they are arranged, in case we couldn't fit as many 200W units!
For those 3x100Ah of Battleborn batteries, you will spend $3000 + tax. But I might suggest looking at 2 of these instead, for around $2060 (free shipping, no tax) and getting 412Ah. www.sokbattery.com/products/12v-206ah-lifepo4-lithium-iron-phosphate-battery-pack We have three of these batteries, and had purchased one of these prior for our travel trailer, they work flawlessly. We bought two of the Battleborns prior, and just cannot justify the cost at all. The warranty is similar, and the battery cells themselves are all from China anyhow. I consider the metal case to be a nice upgrade on the SOK batteries. There are also less expensive options, but we got burned once trying to go with a 300Ah unit previously, so I can't recommend that specifically!
Ok so solar panels really are that allergic to shadows and clouds.
My set up is 3 - 200watt 24V panels and 1 - 50watt 12V panel. 2 of the bigger ones in series while the rest is parallel. All put into a AC200Max BLUETTI power station.
On a sunny day each of the big panels pulls 120watts and the little one gets 30watts. But when put all together they get 120watts which I am trying to figure out why that is now.
But in the shade I was getting 20watts and I was like, is that normal? Welp you got at least twice the better system I got and your numbers dip super low so I guess it is normal. Thanks for the video.
What I may suggest trying is with and without that 50W. I have to wonder if that's bringing your overall numbers down, it may make a bit of a difference dropping that off the 3 others!
@@CozyLivingMachine Really? It could do that? Alright, I will give it ago and see what happens. Thanks
Yep! Different wattage panels have different voltage and amps outputs. The system always favors the lowest voltage or amp, which puts the larger panel on the backburner. This, in turn, reduces the overall efficiency and power output of your solar panel array.
@@CozyLivingMachine By George you were right. I disconnected the small solar panel and I got more power. Thanks
I’m in Seattle too. Need some advice on (tiny budget bare minimum for incase er grid down situation )in small bottom patio apt. Will power station run old fridge and air fryer at times ¿ I can’t afford your fancy setup 😂 I can’t do gas generator option nor afford to have it stolen. (I’m disabled and overwhelmed.) please help.