Powering the O'Shea Adventures

We have been using Renogy solar panels for just over 2 years and have no regrets. When we first started planning our solar setup, we were lucky to come across many long time RVers, that spend at least half of the year living off their solar setup.

Let's be honest here for a moment, setting up your own solar system can be costly, and we were budgeting to do it as efficient and cost-effective as possible. We used our yearly household electricity bill and timed it by 5, since 5 being the number of years we planned to do RV life.

On average our electricity bill was about $2000/year (back in 2020). This gave us a budget of $10,000 to work with to break even on our current budget. 

The basic rule we were taught when buying solar panels was to find a panel that costs $1 per watt.   This will fit a cost effective budget and yet still provide a decent quality panel. So a 200 watt panel should cost you around $200. We were lucky to find that the Renogy panels cost us basically that, and so we purchased 3 panels for our setup. 

When looking at solar panels, it's important to consider how many amps your RV requires to run. Our RV is a 30 amp travel trailer. The panels we picked have a current (Imp or Isc), aka (amps) of 10 amps. You'll use this information to determine how many amps per hour the panel will charge your battery with. So 3 x 200 watt panels providing 10amps per panel of charge will charge a 100 amp battery in 3.25 hours. Keep in mind, this is not running heavy duty electricity drainers like AC, microwave, electric fireplace, etc.

To bring us back to our budget, our setup cost us a total of $3,500 and we are now on year 3, so well under what our electricity expenses were back in our house.

To learn more about the other products in our Solar Setup click here.