Solar panels - Event Date: 29 Nov 2017

Solar panels have nothing to do with wifi and they won't power a heater or the microwave without more solar panels and batteries than you can carry around with you.  And a lot depends on where you camp.  Sunshine is essential, obviously.  We camp a lot in the Smoky Mountains, and you really have to try (harder than it's worth for me) to get solar to do any good there. 

Solar panels are pretty much exclusively about keeping your battery or batteries charged up.  For me, on the sunny Outer Banks, a 100w panel does a great job.  Phones and computers can charge on 12v with the right adapters.  There are 12v fans, including the vent fan in the Pod.  You can use a little 100w inverter to watch TV.

For the microwave, shore power or at least a 2000w generator is the only practical solution.

TT

Thank you for your response. I know solar panels have nothing to do with wifi... I should have either explain or punctuated differently. I need to be able to use my computer is what i was getting at. I'll have an antenna etc for internet access.

I live in Florida and usually travel where sun isn't a problem, which is why I started thinking about solar panels. You def gaveme soome good advice on panel, inverter, and generator wattage.
Thank you

Originally posted by WillThrill Charging the phone consumes almost no power.  A laptop computer will probably consume around 150 watts of power as long as it's running, so if you're using it much during the day, you'll probably want at least 200 watts worth of solar panels so you can run your computer and still put a little energy back into your batteries when the sun is shining.  On cloudy days, you'll need shore power or a generator.

Second that. A "large" cell phone battery is in the neighborhood of 3000 milliamp-hours. Since they are all pretty much lithium-ion batteries, that means that charging a battery of this size from empty to full takes about 10 watt-hours. That is ~~ 1% of a kilowatt-hour. To give you a perspective of the cost, a common price for a kilowatt-hour is about 15 cents. So the cost to charge a phone is 0.15 cents. So you would have to charge your phone almost 7 times to use 1 penny of power.

Originally posted by Olddawgsrule To the OP: Micro or Electric heater consume far too much power. Yes it can be done, but at a very big cost. If those items are a 'need', you're better served with a generator.