How Much Solar Do I Need to Live off Grid?
Figuring out how much solar we needed was the most difficult task for us, once we decided we wanted to live off of the grid in our Winnebago Hike travel trailer. We read so many different blogs trying to figure out what was best for our situation - but it took us weeks to make the leap, as everyone’s energy needs are so vastly different.
Read Next: How to Mount Solar Panels and Roof Versus Ground Solar
Things to Consider:
Where are you traveling? Is it a place that has a lot of cloudless sunny days? Will you be in mostly shaded, forest areas boondocking, or out in the open desert?
What time of year are you planning on boondocking? This will determine how many hours of sunlight you will have each day.
How many people will be using this energy? Obviously the more people that are living off the energy, the more panels you will need for charging devices, etc.
What will you be running off of solar power versus propane? How many devices do you have to charge on a daily basis? Do you plan on using a microwave or air conditioning off of solar?
Our Energy Usage (2 Adults)
1 laptop using a 140 Watt charger for 1-2 hours per day
1 tablet using a 30 Watt power adapter for 1 hour per day
1 Hotspot charging for for 1-2 hours per day
2 phones charging 1 hour per day
LED lights for 3-4 hours per day
1 USB light for 3-4 hour s per day
2000 Watt power inverter for several hours per day
27” TV for 2-3 hours per day
1 DVD player for 2-3 hours per day
2 smart watches for 1-2 hours per day using USB
Micro USB fan (8 hours for sleeping)
Camera battery (1-2x per week)
Power Jack (typically 1x a week)
Slide out (typically 1x a week)
Awning (typically 2-3x week)
* We use propane for our refrigerator, hot water heater, and stove. We never use the microwave, air conditioner (which would take a LOT of solar), or convection oven off the grid. We have used the tank heaters on occasions where we are dipping below freezing overnight and the thermostat on only few occasions, as we rarely run the furnace.
How Do I Calculate My Solar Needs?
We used solar calculators, you can find Renogy’s calculator, here. It gave us a rough idea of our needs, as it asks you to put in all of the devices we will be using throughout the day, their various wattages, and how long we would be using each device. It also asked us where we would be residing most of the time and which months we would be using our travel trailer, to calculate the amount of sun we would be getting. It let us know if we did not have enough batteries or solar to charge the devices or electronics we were using each day.
When And Where Will I Be Using Solar?
We plan on being off of the grid in sunny environments in the winter when days are shorter, and in colder environments in the summer. We are currently in the sunny southwest (in the spring), where we pull in more than enough energy to fill up our battery bank during the day and have enough stored to use during the evening. We are currently getting around 13 hours of sunlight throughout the day.
We have not been parking in shade, as we plan to move north as days warm.
How Much Solar Do We Use?
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We ended up purchasing two Renogy 100 Watt solar panels, found here, which we were able to mount on the top of our Winnebago Hike’s exoskeleton with Renogy’s tilt kits, purchased here. We already had one Go Power 100 Watt flex solar panel mounted on our Hike when we purchased it, as part of the Hike’s solar package. Read Next: How we mounted our solar panels and how we wired our solar panels.
We also purchased a Renogy 200 Watt suitcase solar panel. Read Next: Portable versus Rooftop Solar and why we ultimately chose to do a mixture.
We swapped out our tiny 64 Ah battery that came with our Winnebago Hike, for 2 Renogy 100Ah AGM batteries to store our solar power, which you can find here. It is just enough for the two of us, but we would really like an additional battery at some point to store more energy for the winter season or for cloudier locations (such as the PNW).
According to our Renogy app (we purchased this BT enabled charge controller to keep track of our energy consumption), our batteries are currently 100% charged by mid-morning and stay completely charged until the sun goes down, where it starts dropping off, (never below 50%) depending on how much energy we are using. We have only been using 300 Watts of solar panels per day, on our Winnebago when we have full sun. On cloudy days, we did notice that we were not staying fully charged, and we then added our 200 Watt suitcase.