How Many Solar Panels Needed To Run Ac
We suggest a battery bank of 800 amp hours.
How many solar panels needed to run ac. I m not saying it s impossible but it pushes the limits of practicality for a mobile installation. Most boondockers have between 200 to 400 amp hour battery banks. I have to run a 1 ton air conditioner how many panels will i need. Air conditioning doesn t have to be your motive for going solar.
It works the other way as well. To generate the stored electricity needed to run our rv air conditioner all day you d need over 340 square feet of solar panels ish plus 3600 amp hours of battery capacity and guaranteed perfect sunshine. How did i come up with 300. When it s hottest and the sun is shining the brightest i can make lots of power.
In order to meet this need the solar panels would be required to generate 107 amps 7 hours every day this is if it is a clear sunny day. Let s take a look at ac energy requirements and typical solar production to see if solar panels can really run air conditioners in each setup. Clearly this kind of setup can get pricey pretty quickly. Ac for grid connected homes the fact that we are all able to access almost unlimited amounts of electricity 24 7 is a beautiful part of our modern electricity grid.
Eer amount of heat removed in watt power consumed in watt. To get these numbers we used high and low panel production ratios to calculate how many solar panels are needed on average. You will need at least 1 800 watts of solar panels to run your rv air conditioner. How many solar panels do i need to power my house.
Every 1 ton of cooling power commonly known as heat removed by a 1 ton ac in one hour is also expressed as 3516 watts. Installing air conditioning after a solar installation. If you prefer higher efficiency 350 w panels the number would be reduced to 9 to 10 panels. The advantage of solar powered air conditioning.
For this example if you are using 404 kwh per year that is 1 11 kwh per day. So you are going to need a total wattage of 300 combined solar panels. This doesn t include the solar power needed to run anything else in the rv. By this estimate we ll need about 2 500 watts of solar panels just to break even on the ac unit s consumption.
This is assuming you are considering using 12 volt rv grade panels. More is needed with more clouds. Even with the air conditioner on high my solar panel system still makes enough power to add 2 000 watts into the batteries. These numbers only take into account the energy needed for air conditioning.
This is also assuming of course you have a lot of battery power too. This allows me to run the ac full blast to keep my house nice and cool. Lastly you will need the solar panels to keep the battery charged.