The time has come…we’ve finally purchased a solar kit! I say ‘finally’ because it’s something that I have been contemplating ever since we decided to live this trailer life. However I’ve been slow to pull the trigger because of two main factors: cost and the fact that I don’t know sh*t about solar.
After we received news that we could actually keep some of our biscuits that were set aside for the IRS the first hurdle was behind us…now on to the research, research and more research. As mentioned, my knowledge of solar was very limited. All I’ve known about solar is that I’m in for a lot of reading articles and watching YouTube videos. Endless mentions of amps, volts, watts, batteries, charge controllers, inverters….holy crap, it was a lot to take in. But after weeks of taking in the mountain of information that’s hidden among the interwebs I found what I wanted.
Renogy is a company that was recommended by a friend that we met out on the road early in our travels, so it was always in the back of my mind, and after digging a bit I found that this company indeed has pretty good reviews of their products and complete solar kits, so Renogy it was.
Now, what do I need? I kept it pretty simple. Renogy offers a 200 watt premium solar kit around the $400 range that seemed to be a good start.
The plan was to just keep our batteries topped up while keeping our devices charged as well. Now, there are some folks out there that will go all in and install huge systems on their rigs that will climb into the kilowatt range with thousands and thousands of dollars covering their roof…yeah not interested. But if we want to do some true exploring and live off the grid, having a couple of decent solar panels to harvest the free, delicious, beaming sunshine is pretty awesome. Plus the idea of running our generator has never been very appealing when we are surrounded by serene mountain or desert landscapes.
Stay tuned for a future post about the install process, and if you don’t see that post, you can probably guess it didn’t work out so well because my understanding of electricity or electrical systems has never been something that I would say I have, ummmm….great knowledge in, so….pray for me….