Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

HI Guys

As we turn the corner on winter, I'm looking to install solar on my cargo trailer (6X12). I want o bounce my idea off you guys as I know many of you have done solar already and I'd appreciate any feedback.
I'm looking at buying a 100. LIPO4 100ah battery. Yes I could buy the deep cycle but felt it's time to move into the 19th century lol. It is also lighter and can be discharged pretty much down to 0. I'm going to have a small charger for when I park at a campsite with power but I want to dry camp more. Hence the solar. I'm definitely purchasing a mppt as I understand they are much more efficient a controller than the PWM controller.

Questions - is monocrystalline the best bang for your buck and would 100watt solar be enough to charge the above battery in a good day of sun or should I buy several 100 watt panels or a 2-300 watt single panel. I also see there is flexible panels but I feel that there should be some airflow underneath a panel which these flexible panels would not allow. So I'm looking at solid panels on angle brackets screwed to the cross members of the trailer giving me a space under the panels. Thoughts on size of MPPT for my job?

Again any feedback you can give would be greatly appreciated. Even some good web pages explaining solar would be awesome

Cheers
Al in Calgary

I think you should work backwards from the load side, to see what you will need in generating & storage capacity. Add up what will be the worst case scenario & add a small percentage to cover the "extras" you will need. Typically, a 100 watt panel (not into mono-crystal vs others, up to you...) will charge a 100 AH battery well enough every day.

Our 100 watt system (now 7 years old) provides enough energy to run the lights, stereo, fan, TV & sound bar in our teardrop & we have never run out of power when camping. This is with cloudy weather, trees & other sun-stoppers, if there's light outside it will charge. It's better in full sun, but no there's trouble when it isn't.

nose oil

Your system..Is that a 100 watt battery (LIPO4 or deep cycle). and a 100watt panel? I have about the same requirements

Cheers
Al

yycwrangler, Howdy;

Here's a great Y-T channel that can answer alot of your questions;
https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse

and we have our own electrical genius flboy, here's a link to his latest
creation;
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=73788

hank

From my experience, the 100w panel / 100Ah, or any multiples of that (like 200w / 200Ah) does work, but it is living a little too close to the edge for me. If I get in a camp spot where I'm not in direct sun, or a few days of cloudy, I really do not enjoy the process of attempting to throttle back lights and TV usage just to keep the fridge running.

To me the minimums are then 200w of panel for a 100Ah battery or multiples thereof.

Where you do not want to short yourself in your first system is your charge controller. Get a good MPPT unit that is capable of, in your case, accepting the input of three or even 4 100 watt panels for your 100Ah battery. There is nothing better than having your battery right up to snuff as soon as possible in the morning.

You can START then with the 100watt panel.. and if you need faster charging, just plug in another panel or two as needed without another component purchase. One possible side note to that however is if you buy a single charge controller for the one panel, and have to add another panel, you could run that through a second matching charge controller..... this would give you some redundancy if a charge controller fails. I like redundancy !

But like another poster mentioned, you do have to start first on what you will be drawing for current to make sure you have enough battery to start with.

Here is what I put into a cargo trailer conversion I'm working on. It's a 24 volt inverter/mppt charger, with 2 batteries and a 12 volt step down transformer, and 4 100 watt renogy panels hooked in series parallel for 400 watts and 10 amps input. has 4 110 outlets on the side of the inverter.