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Old 01-12-2017, 04:11 PM   #1
Taberry
 
Join Date: Sep 2016
Location: Florida
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solar panels for residental fridge

We have a 2016 Sandpiper 5th wheel with a LG residential fridge, elec only, we are thinking of buying portable solar panels to power the fridge when we do not have hookups. Has anybody looked into this or done this? We don't want to buy a generator.
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Old 01-12-2017, 04:19 PM   #2
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We had a 200 watt panel installed on our new River Stone Legacy, saw Cedar creek was doing it on their Champagne line and thought it was a good idea. If you boon dock a lot it would seem to only help.
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Old 01-12-2017, 04:19 PM   #3
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Gonna take a lot of panels,,,,,
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Old 01-13-2017, 07:17 AM   #4
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You really cannot boondock with a residential fridge without a generator. Sure you could put in 1000 watts of solar and have at least 4 deep cycle batteries and you might make it on good days, but you will still probably have to resort to running a generator at times. When I switched to a residential fridge class A I threw out my stove top coffee maker and switched to electric since I have to run every morning anyway when boondocking and might as well have electric coffee since the generator has way too much output for merely running a converter.
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Old 01-16-2017, 02:13 PM   #5
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I don't have a residential fridge but I can tell you what you'll need to do to figure out what you'll need in solar power if you wnat to boondock.
1. You need to know how much power your fridge uses per day. You can purchase a watt-hour meter tnd measure the power consumption of the fridge over a number of days (and conditions) to see how much power it uses.
2. Using the results above, figure out how big a battery bank you'll need to run the fridge for at least 36 hours. Don't forget that lead acid batteries can't be fully discharged because that damages them. If you use golf cart batteries, you can figure on drawing 80% of their rated capacity from them then immediately recharging them if you want to avoid damaging the batteries.
3. Once you have the size of the battery bank determined, you can figure out what you'll need in the way of solar panels to recharge them. For the solar projects I've worked on, I generally figure on no more than 5 hours of sun per day. This accounts for losses from the panels not being pointed at the optimum direction.

Don't forget that for many solar panels, if one cell is shaded then the entire panel has no output. There are panels with internal bypass diodes that don't suffer from this problem.

Phil
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