Ok, we have a shell on our trailer. We have a skylight, so we can see inside in the daytime. But what about about after it gets dark? We need food storage, we need lighting, we need to be able to charge goodies. Time to mount the solar panels and build our distro panels.
You can just go out and buy a full solar panel setup at Harbor Freight, or from a big box store.
But a little research will quickly show you the excess costs and reduced power of buying these kits.
The HF kit uses (3) 15-watt panels, and costs $130 on sale. You get some wire, a crappy 5-amp solar controller, (2) florescent (huh?) lights, and that's about it. No battery, no inverter, nada. 45 watts isn't much.
Lowe's or Home Depot will sell you bigger kits, but for $500-900 you are getting at best a poor or minimal system compared to what you can build yourself for not much more.
Let's see how I approached this.
I bought (2)100-watt, 12v panels w/ 30y warranty from Grape Solar from Home Depot for $100 each on sale. I went on Ebay and found a 1500 watt true sine wave inverter for $75, a 30-amp solar controller for $20 and a bunch of MC-4 connectors to wire it all up with for around $20. I salvaged some 6g jumper cables for heavy wiring the 12v components, and 10g wire for the rest. A sealed, 4D, 12-volt, 200AH industrial-grade Acid Glass Mat (AGM) battery was $370, but it's HUGE, vibration-proof, nearly indestructible and a steal at that price. One last Ebay purchase was a handful of LED automotive strip-style 12v, 0.33A running lights for $3 ea.
I located a recycled 12v blade-fused trailer distro panel for a few bucks and bought a 2 circuit 120v panel box at the ReStore for $10. So for around $700 I have a 200Watt, 200 Amp-Hour Solar Panel system. The system is robust, durable, and puts out way more juice than anything I could have bought for the same price. I can run a computer, microwave, or anything else I want on the true sine 120v circuits, and light the box with the high output 12v LEDs while using way less power than the HF kit's CFL lights would have used.
Step one is to mount the Panels. I strongly recommend putting them on top of the Ladder rack even though they are way more visible there. Any shade on your panels will reduce panel output by 50% or more- for example, the shade from the ladder rack uprights will kill output. Likewise, overheating of the panels massively reduces panel power output, so raising them up off the roof to allow airflow underneath is very helpful.
In our case I bolted each of them to (2) superstrut stringers, that were in turn bolted to the top of our ladder rack (also made of salvaged superstrut). This made for a VERY strong structure, compared to the flimsy-ass solar panels, which are mostly glass, aluminum angle sides and epoxy.
The next step is to figure out where you want the Battery box to go, and how you are going to route your Solar Panel wiring to it. Keeping the wires short and fat is helpful; this is a low-voltage current.
I used jumper cables here, and fused the panels before running the leads into the solar controller as a safety measure.
Your next set of wires from the Controller pass through another set of fuses and go to the battery. Once again, you want to use heavy-gauge wire and good fuses. A 4D 200AH AGM is three times the size of a car battery and this particular model is capable of delivering 2000 Amps for 5 seconds, which is terrifying. It can easily cook any stupid people who short it out.
Next you want to place your remaining electrical components near to the battery, but solidly attached, so that wire runs are kept short. These wires run to the 'load' output on the Controller, except for the inverter, which connects directly to the battery, and from the inverter to the 120v panel. 12v DC power does not transmit nearly as well as 120v AC, and needs much heaver wire to boot. You need to mount both the 12v and 120v panels, and run your wires.
The 12v LED lights get mounted and wired up with a switch, and then run to the 12v distro panel.
I used a cut-down steel sheetrock c-channel as a reflector/heat sink, glued and screwed onto one edge of the ceiling. Then I placed the LEDs in there to cast light across the ceiling as indirect lighting and concealed them in a cove. Placing the lighting above eye level and behind a cove means good lighting without blinding glare. The same cove has additional space deeper in the open wedge that can conceal the down line from the solar panels.
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