Energize Your RV with Solar

Nothing inspires a great night of camping like a tent and cozy sleeping bag. For others, the comforts of home are essential. Recreational vehicles can be great ways to camp in luxury and style. Unfortunately, style comes at a price, and there’s a lot to be done before an RV may be worthy of the open road. Ensuring that your RV has sufficient electrical power will also ensure a great trip. With rising fuel costs, longer trips can be more costly than planned, and time spent on alternative ways to offset fuel use can mean money saved. A Solar RV system is a great way to keep you cruisin’.

When compared to running an RV generator to charge batteries an RV solar panel can yield substantial savings. As a bonus, a solar RV panel saves you from the noise of the generator, allowing you to better enjoy the nature you went looking for. About the only trouble they'll give other campers is maybe reflecting sunlight into their eyes.

The panel itself is used to charge the RV batteries by absorbing the suns light during the day, then converting it into direct current electricity, which is stores in the batteries for nighttime use. Or, for ‘boondockers’ and more ‘hard core RV’ers’ more powerful systems are available to help run appliances like ovens and air conditioning units. While a solar panel unit to charge batteries is a reasonable expense, you may find the stronger panels much more expensive.

If you are a boondocker, your RV solar electric system should be sized according to your needs. If you only occasionally boondock your RV, then you may not need a large system. But if you live in your RV off-grid, you might want to think about investing in a more powerful system.

Any way you look at it, anything that keeps that generator running at a minimum is worth every penny spent. You save money on expensive fuel to run the generator, you preserve and conserve a small portion of the environment and resources, and you do your part to minimize noise pollution in an environment that nearly always demands silence.

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