Running Ac On Solar Panels

The short answer is the number of solar panels depends on which solar panels and air conditioner you have.

Running ac on solar panels.

So we ll assume these to give you an idea. This doesn t include the solar power needed to run anything else in the rv. We suggest a battery bank of 800 amp hours. This allows me to run the ac full blast to keep my house nice and cool.

In the video i did not allow the a c to run long enough for the compressor to kick on. You will need at least 1 800 watts of solar panels to run your rv air conditioner. The advantage of solar powered air conditioning. Clearly this kind of setup can get pricey pretty quickly.

So if you have a powerful air conditioner you ll need to make sure your solar panel system can handle it. Even with the air conditioner on high my solar panel system still makes enough power to add 2 000 watts into the batteries. How much you use the air conditioner. Can you use solar panels to run air conditioner units.

To provide that energy you need enough solar panels installed properly to capture the radiant energy of the sun. Unfortunately this means to run our a c regularly it requires roughly double the wattage of solar panels so 1500 watts and at least double the amp hour. Air conditioners typically use between 1 2kw 2 5kw of power and a typical solar panel system has an energy output of 2kw 4kw. This is assuming you are considering using 12 volt rv grade panels.

This is also assuming of course you have a lot of battery power too. To run the 15 000btu air conditioner continuously from solar you would need a battery bank large enough to serve as an energy buffer from peak production hours through the night roughly 3000ah and a 14 400w solar array. The solar array would take up 936 square feet. Most boondockers have between 200 to 400 amp hour battery banks.

In a word yes. An air conditioning unit uses lots of energy to remove heat from a room. A solar panel can run an air conditioner but it ll use a large portion of your panel s capacity. When it s hottest and the sun is shining the brightest i can make lots of power.

Video information update our 13 500 btu rv air conditioner actually pulls about 150 amps instead of 73 amps while running from a 12 volt source. When it comes to solar power the bigger the better. By this estimate we ll need about 2 500 watts of solar panels just to break even on the ac unit s consumption. How many solar panels to run the air conditioner.