# Beginning  RVing power concerns and recharging batteries



## Figomagic (Feb 12, 2015)

Hi there. thank you so much for having me on the forum. My wife and I are planning on buying our first RV in may and taking the leap to live full time on the road. we are trying to do as much research before hand as possible to avoid too many complications later.

We are finding it hard to work out the powering of devices whilst on the road mostly because there is a lot of contradictory info out there confusing us. We want to run laptops microwave fridge, TV and kettle and a few other gadgets plus charge phones and Ipads. we are planning on getting a  500ah-1000ah deep cell battery with and an inverter to be able to power it all with solar panels for charging we were planing on having 3 batteries so that when we are using 1 we have 1 charging and 1 waiting to be used. what aspects of this setup have we missed? how long would a 1000ah battery last and would solar be the best way to charge since we are on the road and not hooked up to the grid?  if possible and I know this is a big ask is there a better way of providing enough power that we haven't thought of.  thank you so much for your help


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## C Nash (Feb 12, 2015)

Welcome to the forum.  All modern campsites will have electric hookup and will power your rv.  If Boondocking you will have problems trying to power microwave with batteries IMO.  Need more info on how you plan traveling.


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## C Nash (Feb 12, 2015)

Also if you are looking at MH they will have generators.


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## Dub (Dec 27, 2015)

If you do decide to go with solar, why not hook a charge controller and panels directly to your existing batteries instead of swapping back and forth? If you need more battery, it's going to be easier to wire extras in parallel. I agree with Chelse on the microwave. Even if your inverter is large enough to run the microwave, it's probably not a good idea to try to pull them much power from batteries. A small 900 watt microwave is going to pull somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90 amps on the 12 volt side. If you don't have generator or plan on plugging in to utility power much, I would guess you are probably looking at needing about 300 watts worth of panels to get by. That's if you have good sunlight and it's just a guess without knowing what the power consumption is on all of your devices and what the average usage time per day is going to be. If you are going to be relying heavily on your solar, I would recommend taking a good look at a MPPT charge controller. They are more expensive than PWM controllers, but can be worth it. Definitely research the differences between them..


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