Especially when used outdoors or in a mobile home, you have a small solar system so that you can also have something of the modern lifestyle with electric lights, mobile phones, refrigerators and maybe even televisions in nature. The sun does not shine at night and therefore only electricity that has been stored somewhere can be used. Electrical devices should also be used at night when travelling.
A customer asked us a legitimate question today, to which there is unfortunately no universal answer:
What kind of battery do I need in my motorhome for 2 x 100 watts?
The customer probably uses the 200-watt set that we offer in our shop . This is connected directly to the existing storage (vehicle battery) using a charge controller. However, anyone who already has experience with a "normal" car battery knows that they can only store a limited amount of electricity and are better used for what they were created for: starting an engine.
When answering the question, the size of the PV modules and their number is of little importance, because these are almost always sufficient to charge any affordable storage device on a "normal" day.
As already described in a previous article , the EcoFlow system can be used, for example. The small variant, as we have it available at the moment, comes with a memory of 256 Wh. This memory is charged at 2 x 100 watts in less than 2 hours (with full sun), or in bad weather it can be fully charged throughout the day.
It is exciting what kind of electrical devices should be operated when the sun is not shining. For example, when I'm on the go, I have light that discharges the memory with 50 watts of absolute holiday lighting - the memory would therefore last for 5 hours.
My recommendation to the customer is therefore to first determine the "comfort consumption", ie to create a table or something similar in which he writes down which devices are to be operated at what power during the night.