Going Solar

At the beginning of May, we stopped at AM Solar in Springfield, Oregon to have a large solar system installed on our Tiffin Allegro Bus motorhome.  I recently had enough time and good weather to be able to take a few pictures of the finished system.

 

The  motorhome we purchased for our full time adventure is an "all electric" model.  Since we want to dry camp occasionally and only run the diesel generator when absolutely required (like running the air conditioners), we went for a rather large solar system, assuming that conditions will sometimes only allow the system to operate at a reduced efficiency.

 

A picture from the top of the rear access ladder of our fifteen 100W panels. 

The front seven panels

A couple mid-ship

And six toward the rear

Three Blue Sky 3024i MPPT charge controllers were installed in a basement compartment, each handling a bank of 5 solar panels. Each controller has a switch between itself and its bank of panels.

 

The charge controllers feed our 900AH AGM battery bank in the next compartment. Each controller has a 50A circuit breaker between itself and the battery bank.

The three charge controllers operate in parallel and behave like a single larger charge controller, all managed from a single remote panel mounted inside the coach, located near other power management panels.

The panels were mounted on tall panel brackets to minimize potential shading from the side roof rails and the air conditioner units.  2 AWG wiring was used between the junction box for each bank of solar panels and each charge controller.  This was done to minimize the loss in the wire under high charge currents.