850 watts of solar, 500amps of battery, and a 5k btu A/C

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Manitou
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850 watts of solar, 500amps of battery, and a 5k btu A/C

Post by Manitou »

I met a guy the other day (Josh) that has the ability to run an air consistioner for 2hrs on battery/inverter. I mentioned this forum, so hopefully he joins, but apparently.. It can be done.
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Blue~Go
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Re: 850 watts of solar, 500amps of battery, and a 5k btu A/C

Post by Blue~Go »

Yes it can. It's just very, very power intensive, thus requiring more solar and battery than you would need for most other purposes. e.g. he's able to run the (smallish) Air-con for two hours, BUT his system is over four times larger (solar panels) (batteries are about two times larger) than the one I've been running the whole coach on (including a compressor refrigerator) for over a year, with power to spare.

Still, if Air-con is important, and short run times are sufficient, it can totally be done. Just depends on what you value and what your use-case is (doesn't it always!). When folks say it's not possible, they are usually responding to someone who says something like "Okay, I'm getting 250 watts of solar, so now I can run my roof Air Conditioner, microwave, and induction cooktop while I'm camping, right?" (Answer, no, not in a practical sense, yet, without a special/large/purpose-designed system and a smaller Air-conditioner.)
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Manitou
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Re: 850 watts of solar, 500amps of battery, and a 5k btu A/C

Post by Manitou »

He's got the electric fridge and water heater too. Has propane as a backup for somethings, but mainly all electric.
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Blue~Go
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Re: 850 watts of solar, 500amps of battery, and a 5k btu A/C

Post by Blue~Go »

Wow, I'd like to know how he's running an electric water heater from solar. That's formidable. (I don't even use a water heater, and propane works really well for heating so it's not something I'd do; but I'm always still interested in these things).

Actually in a way though, that doesn't make sense to me. Water is so easy to heat with propane, and it sounds like he has a propane system - so not sure why he'd want to heat it with DC electricity (?). Air-conditioning, on the other hand, is NOT something you can easily do with propane, hence folks working it with solar now that solar has become more affordable for massive panel setups.

I have read about someone converting an AC electric water heater to DC, and Whale does make a DC electric water heater -- but making heat is a very intense thing with electricity (hence why things like electric heaters, heat guns, and etc. are so hard to run on DC). Reason Whale does it is that propane is a whole 'nother animal on boats - you can't have things like refrigerators and water heaters that just need to be able to light whenever they want to - propane is something that is used specifically at a moment in time. Like you turn on the propane system, light the stove, cook something, then turn off the propane system. It's much easier to use propane for things in RV's though.
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