Solar panels + Batteries + Battery Management System
Setting up your motorhome to free camp can be challenging. This is our off-grid power set up.
Our major concern was to have enough off-grid power to keep our house batteries charged. We need sufficient power to charge the batteries in our cameras, laptops, drones, tablets and phones. We also need power for our lights and 218lt compressor fridge.
This all needs to be maintained when we are without the convenience of 240v power. Providing the sun is shining and our solar panels are not in any shade, we can run indefinitely without accessing 240v power.
Solar Panels
How much solar do we need? We estimated that we would be right with 2 x 160w panels provided we get a decent amount of sunlight each day.
We then opted for a 200w solar blanket as our third “panel”. This helps on cloudy days whilst also giving us the option to move the solar blanket in direct sunlight to boost the input into our house batteries when necessary.
Batteries
Whilst the best way of storing power is Lithium, Lithium batteries are still quite pricey.
We opted to have 2 x 100ah AGM batteries installed when we purchased our motorhome. Our intention is to replace these batteries with Lithium when they need replacing.
Battery Management System
This is the “brains” for the system. You can have as many solar panels and batteries as you can afford, but if you can’t get the best out of them, then it’s wasted .
Our motorhome has a complete battery management and monitoring system from BMPRO.
DC2DC Charger & Inverter
We also installed an Enerdrive 40amp DC2DC Charger. This allows us to charge our batteries whilst driving between locations.
For those times where we need to access 240v power for a short duration, we also had installed an Enerdrive 2000w pure sine wave inverter.
DC2DC Charger installed.
2000w Inverter installed.