Hello everybody just wanted to pick your brains if I can.! have fitted a 100 watt solar panel to my Swift cornetti diamond 1993 it has two 110 amp hour batteries. Now I am faced with two Solutions I can buy a 1500 watt pure sine wave inverter to connect to the batteries purely just to run the fridge 60 Watts, the trouble I am faced with he's if I plug the power lead from the caravan into the inverter effectively powering itself to the 1500 watt inverter it will power the fridge and charge the battery is there a way where I can disconnect the mains charger so the inverter will run the caravan electrics I E television fridge lighting without powering the caravan battery charger because I have been told this will cause a loop which will destroy the inverter and batteries. All good I find the 12 volt connection to the fridge and one that straight from the charge controller form the solar system and how would I find them wires hope explain this properly thank you for your replies and timetime..
A 100 watt solar panel is not going to run your fridge through a 1.5kw inverter for long.
Firstly the 100 watt solar panel won't put out 100 watts all day, only in direct sunlight which at best will be a few hours.
Secondly the regulator won't be 100% efficient so you can probably deduct 10% of the solar panel capacity just lost on that.
An inverter generally consumes around 10% of its capacity, so a big inverter like that will use pretty much everything the solar panel puts in on its own.
There is a switch on my charger which I can turn off to connect an inverter to my ehu input. This is great inasmuch as I can use my internal sockets to plug in a tv etc, but in reality, a few hours watching tv and some 12 volt lights is about the limit for a 100 watt panel. Run the fridge on gas.
Agree with the above comments -- if it works at all, it won't work for long and I wouldn't have thought the effort would be worthwhile.
I hope that the second battery is contained within a properly sealed and vented box and is not under a bed giving off explosive gases!
DaveS1
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Topic: Solar power
