I made a solar system for the camper. I started this really not knowing what I was doing. I got it all done and still probably don’t know much :) It’s kinda ugly, but works great. Ran the first big test yesterday and came no where near killing the battery. We ran stuff on it all day and the battery only dropped to 12.5 volts (dead is 10.5). Stuff we ran all day: stereo, mp3 player, RF transmitter, and LED christmas lights. For part of the day it was charging my phone and then I put on a table lamp with a CFL in it. I’ll post the full test at the bottom of the post. The battery is an Optima D34 deep cycle battery. That damn thing cost as much as the rest of the system put together, but it looks like it was worth it. The only thing Amongst the things that we wont be able to run are the electric space heaters, toaster oven and electric skillet. They just draw too much juice. Most of them use from 1000 to 1500 watts and I don’t have an inverter large enough to handle it. Anyway on the the pictures….

This is the battery, charge controller, inverter, and LED lights from before I installed it in the camper.

If your still interested more after the jump….

Our nice fold up 15 watt solar panel. We got this and the charge controller off ebay.

This is basically the same setup I used to test the system out in the camper yesterday…

This is 3 different screens that you can get on the controller…

Then there was the building of the Frankenpanel. I had 2 of the little panels for keeping you battery on you car charged laying around that I had for a long time. So I decided to wire them up and see what happened. I knew they wouldn’t put out a lot of power, but every little bit helps. So that worked well and then I saw another 2 pack of the little panels at Costco for $15. Well why not? So I wired all four panels together and screwed them to some 2x4s. Pretty? NO. Works? Great! It puts out about half the power that the panels I bought does.

Then here is the controller mounted in the camper. The battery is under the seat in front of it. You can see Bela hanging out in here also :)

And finally the test. I’m not sure how well this will show up in the post, but if your really interested click on it and you can get a bigger version on Flickr. Oh and those are times all the way to the left.

So hopefully this will all work well for us on vacation. Colorado here we come!

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