Micro-Air easy start

Re DC a/c's, that has been done many times. I did a 3 ton solar powered 120Vdc icemaking system out in the desert in Egypt. That was back in the early 90's, when inverters were expensive, inefficient, and unreliable.  And conventional a/c's were inefficient. Those days are in the past, I wouldn't design that system the same way now. Now you can get cheap, high efficiency, reliable inverters that allow you to run the new ultra high efficiency a/c of your choice. 

And if I was going to do a dc a/c of any reasonable capacity it wouldn't be at 12V. The resistive losses will kill you. Even a 12KBTU/hr high efficiency a/c will draw about 800W/67A (our crummy a/c's use about 2kW). 67A at 12V over a 20ft conductor run requires 1/0 copper conductor to keep the losses below 3%. 

Start surge capacity shouldn't be a problem with dc battery based systems, batteries aren't current limited like gensets are. The problem will come if the compressor uses a permanent magnet dc motor because the high start currents can demagnetize it. That can be solved with current limiting starting resistors that get switched out after the compressor is up and running. or just use a wound stator dc motor. 

If even one RV burns to the ground...and one investigator sees the crispy easy start innards with a blown capacitor....or one 98 year old guy falls off the RV roof and hires a new and hungry lawyer while still in the hospital bed, then poof!

Instant lawsuit.

Actually I was thinking of putting it on my backup window a/c which I installed in the bedroom for when our power is out after the hurricanes. The window unit startup surge sometimes trips the Honda when the fridge is on at the same time. 

If however you wanna take a nice camping trip to the OBX and take both the roof air and easystart off my hands i would make you a good deal on the combo . Weather is great this time of year (between hurricanes anyhow) 

I think I can get about 1kw of solar on the 179 if I remove the roof a/c. That would give about 4 kWh/day average in NC in the summer which would just about run a high efficiency a/c (not our roof a/c's) overnight. Daytime use would require additional TV or genny charging. But running a generator or TV in the daytime isn't restricted, its the night time that's the problem.  

Apparently Watt shipped some of these to Erwin Hymer (aka Roadtrek) about a year ago. Looks like Erwin Hymer has gone bankrupt since and there aren't any recent announcements from Watt so I wouldn't expect much anytime soon. There are a couple of asian sources for portable fuel cells but they apparently use a special expensive methanol fuel rather than commercial propane, so they're not very practical at this point. 

Sorry, I should have said 20A home circuit, not 15A. 20A does OK running the trailer as long as I don't run other things at the same time.