Running Ac On Solar Panels

An air conditioning unit uses lots of energy to remove heat from a room.

Running ac on solar panels.

How much you use the air conditioner. Most boondockers have between 200 to 400 amp hour battery banks. Can you use solar panels to run air conditioner units. The short answer is the number of solar panels depends on which solar panels and air conditioner you have.

By this estimate we ll need about 2 500 watts of solar panels just to break even on the ac unit s consumption. To run the 15 000btu air conditioner continuously from solar you would need a battery bank large enough to serve as an energy buffer from peak production hours through the night roughly 3000ah and a 14 400w solar array. When it comes to solar power the bigger the better. The solar array would take up 936 square feet.

You will need at least 1 800 watts of solar panels to run your rv air conditioner. A solar panel can run an air conditioner but it ll use a large portion of your panel s capacity. Air conditioners typically use between 1 2kw 2 5kw of power and a typical solar panel system has an energy output of 2kw 4kw. How many solar panels to run the air conditioner.

We suggest a battery bank of 800 amp hours. Unfortunately this means to run our a c regularly it requires roughly double the wattage of solar panels so 1500 watts and at least double the amp hour. Video information update our 13 500 btu rv air conditioner actually pulls about 150 amps instead of 73 amps while running from a 12 volt source. Clearly this kind of setup can get pricey pretty quickly.

When it s hottest and the sun is shining the brightest i can make lots of power. In the video i did not allow the a c to run long enough for the compressor to kick on. In a word yes. A few factors determine how many solar panels you will require to run an air conditioner.

If your home is connected to the grid and your solar installation is net metered it is possible to use solar energy to cool your house. This allows me to run the ac full blast to keep my house nice and cool. We ll need about twelve 200 amp hour solar panels and one 100 amp hour panel to run the ac. So we ll assume these to give you an idea.

This doesn t include the solar power needed to run anything else in the rv. This is also assuming of course you have a lot of battery power too. To provide that energy you need enough solar panels installed properly to capture the radiant energy of the sun. This is assuming you are considering using 12 volt rv grade panels.