AnswerID: 26774 Submitted: Monday, Aug 04, 2003 at 18:30
joc45
replied:
Dwayne,
If you are only using lights in your Jayco, and no
fridge from the 12v, then solar might be overkill, unless you are staying in the one spot for a week or more.
It might be easier and a lot cheaper to run a charge lead from your car to charge the battery while driving.
Don't use incandescent 12v lights, rather use the high-eff flouros (see Jaycar catalogue, a great one is ST3006, currently about $29 on special, but they have several others there as well, like the SL2850 for about $19). These hi-eff lights put out great gobs of light for less than 1A consumption. If you are running a 70AH aux battery in the Jayco, then you could theoretically run the light for 10 hrs a day for a week! (yeh, ok, someone will pick a flaw in this argument, but you get the idea). If you are on the move every few days, then the battery should keep a reasonable state of charge all the time.
The only qualification I give here, is to keep the battery size reasonable - don't go too small, coz they take many hours to recharge if you drain the thing right down, so a bigger battery given a shallow discharge will recover quicker than a small battery given a deep discharge.
If you feel you must go solar, then there are lots of threads on this site.
Rgds
Gerry
Reply 1 of 2
