Quote:
Originally Posted by ZekenSpider
I know the on board solar systems can help make up the difference but only if you are traveling in the full sun.
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My experience with my solar panels is that they provide benefit in most daytime conditions. Cloudy or overcast, I get some charging performance out of them. I don't know if it is the MPPT controller that is making the difference or not but I do get quite a bit of benefit even when it is pretty foggy out. Most of my camping is dry-camping at beaches and on the California Central Coast that frequently means fog until 10A or noon even. We had a recent camping trip to Refugio. 6 days off the grid. There were about 2 days that I would call sunny. The rest were foggy most of the day with only intermittent sun. It was actually freakishly overcast as matter of fact. Nevertheless, we could have stayed indefinitely under these conditions from a battery SOC perspective and we were not conserving electricity at all.
More germaine to this thread is that the solar panels made us power positive while driving with the frig on DC. Prior to the solar panel installation we were probably 2-3A negative while driving.