How Much Solar Power Do I Need For My RV? - Nomads In Nature

After hundreds of hours of research, I built up enough confidence to install our RV solar system on my own. Completing this project felt like a lifetime achievement.

Through this RV solar series, I want to help you do something that you didn’t know that you were capable of accomplishing.

How Solar Power Works

While there are unlimited ways to customize your solar setup to fit your needs, every system has 3 major parts:

• Solar Panels – Take in raw power from the sun

• Charge Controller – Converts the raw power from the panels into a format that can easily be stored

• Batteries – Store power to use when the sun is not out

Having these components will allow you to use DC power. Most RVs are configured to use DC power for your lights, water pump, slides, fridge, and furnace. Many newer rigs also have USB ports using DC power to charge small electronics like cell phones.

If you want to use AC power (think normal household plugs), you will need to add an inverter to your system. Inverters take the DC power stored in your batteries and change it to AC power that you can use for your TV and microwave.

Inverters can be pretty pricey ($200 – $2,000+) depending on which appliances you want to run, so many RVers choose to keep their systems simple and rely on DC power.

For example, we love our espresso machine and air fryer, and use them every day so we decided to invest in a high-powered 3000 watt inverter that cost us $1100.

I will discuss the system components in more detail in our post on RV Solar System Costs, where I will give our options on different solar kits as well as our exact RV solar setup.

If your head is spinning a little bit from all of this information, I recommend that you check out this video outlining a simple RV solar setup. Jared from All About RVs is an incredible source for various RV projects and gadgets.

RV Solar Calculator

Estimating your power use will take a little bit of research and math. To make things easy on you (and to take the math part off your hands), I built this RV solar power calculator for you to use.