Living by the Laws of Nature, Not by the Laws of Man
When we were in the planning stages of building out our van, we had only heard about solar power, but we knew we needed it. In this blog we will tell you about why we went with Renogy solar panels and how they allow us to live off-grid full-time! We found a very helpful YouTube video about how to figure out the amount of solar power we would use each day, how large our battery bank needed to be and how many watts of solar we required. While designing our electrical system we found countless options for batteries, solar controllers, solar panels, inverters and then figuring out how to wire them together--it all felt very overwhelming! This was the most confusing part of getting our van build started since it was one of the first things to set up. We chose to go with the Goal Zero Yeti 1400 which took a lot of the guess work out of it as it has the battery, solar controller, inverter and display all in one unit with options to expand. We first heard about Renogy after purchasing our Goal Zero battery unit and was told they were compatible. We landed on two 160 watt panels because they were the highest output 12v panels they offered at the time and only slightly larger in size compared to the 100 watt panels. We were familiar with basic 12v installations from previous jobs so the install was a snap. Each panel comes with a positive and negative wire that were basically plug and play with our battery unit. So, we ended up with 320 watts of solar feeding our 1400 mAh lithium battery (roughly 116 Ah). For our daily usage, this has been more than adequate for us.
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Jess & ShawnFollow along with us. We will share our cruxes in life and the beta we found to solve them. ArchivesCategories |