Off Grid Solar Powered RV Air Conditioning – Is it Possible?

one of the most common wild camping or off-the-court questions we get is can I run my air conditioner off of my solar well technically the answer would be no because you're actually running your AC off of your batteries and your inverter yeah but even on top of that the air conditioner is such a high draw and a consistently high draw device that would require a lot of solar and a lot of batteries to keep that baby go which means a lot of dough we realized recently that well we've been telling people this but we've never actually tested it No so what better time do you conduct an experiment than when you're wild capping more we're welcome our AC is not wired to the inverter so we're gonna do a temporary connection just for this test looks like they're here now you may recognize those famous hands we decided to invite over our friends the RV geeks because well we didn't want something terrible to happen and turn this into some awful how not to video of some sort and because well we don't really recommend you do this on your own if this actually works then we would suggest going to a professional to make sure that you have your air conditioner wired to run off of your inverter permanently and not kind of this temporary fix that we are doing for today's experiment that's my disclaimer okay you're wired through the inverter let er rip thanks so much guys yeah hope you stay cool obviously today's a little cloudy a little overcast yeah so we're gonna wait for a sunnier day and a little bit warmer before we conclude our experiment this test TV maybe tomorrow as you can see it's a beautiful sunny day here in California yes and it's a balmy 80 degrees inside the RV right now which is going to be perfect for our testing now before we dive into all that we want to remind you of all the technology we have on this RV yeah like our go power all-electric kit which comes with 960 watts of solar and the Outback charge controller we also have a 3000 watt hybrid Magnum inverter and the most important part by far of this puzzle batteries lithium batteries we have 700 amp hours of lithium batteries onboard but can it handle the high draw power of an air conditioner okay my battery's at a hundred percent 81 degrees in here we're bringing in full Sun panels are tilted this is our best shot at completely running the AC off of our batteries and everything so this is kind of a big deal I'm nervous you ready let's go for it cool mode Auto we're going to want to keep our eye over here as I crank it down this number is going to shoot way up as soon as that compressor kicks on craik it down to 66 my heart is kind of pumping this is all right okay that was the compressor warming up the fan kicking on and whoa okay so just for a quick second this fault thing the light lit up it wasn't enough to cause a proper fault because it's such a surge but it obviously did not like that much power being sucked out it's only pulling out 78 amps and it's been on for a few seconds now we'll check it back in a little bit 80 amps oh yeah that feels good it's amazing cold yeah real good there's air conditioning and we're not let bend anything because we have so much solar we're bringing in a lot of power right now about 45 amps or so the AC is pulling out about 80 to 85 amps so in theory we're really only using 30 amps from the battery bank which is almost nothing well not really nothing but you know what I'm saying it's not 80 it's not 80 it's true the air conditioner has been running for about half an hour now and the biggest thing that makes all of this possible for us is the fact that we have lithium batteries and it's because they are still a little much stronger than the typical battery and the fact that we have about three times more useable amp hours than what comes standard on this RV and the reason I'm telling you that is because I don't want somebody at home it has a small or typical battery bank thinking they should try to run their air conditioner off of their batteries because you could very well destroy your battery bank so anyway that is my disclaimer disclaimer - for this video Yeah right it requires a lot of disclaimers by the way making lemonade because I have air conditioning and it's a warm sunny day and it just seems like the right thing to do there's two things that concern me so far with this test the first one being that little fault that we saw I'm going to contact Magnum and ask them what they think about that but I know surging the inverter is hard on it and you don't want to surge it too many times that's one thing and the mace thing is the batteries batteries have a finite number of life cycles so in theory by using the AC we are lowering the life expectancy of our batteries we are pulling in as much power as we can and pulling out a ton of power all at the same time so I'm not sure exactly what it does to our batteries but I know it will reduce the lifespan of our battery that was hard to get out yeah that's a lot of information the fact that we've only pulled out about 35 amp hours from our batteries makes me think we can run this AC for I don't know several hours no problem so the question we posed was can you run your air conditioner off of your solar and batteries and I think we've proven that with this test yes the answer is yes with the right technology you can definitely do it definitely but we're will be I think yes but holding with like a good thumbs up or knowing that we're not putting too much strain on each market licenses will contact the professionals the manufacturers and ask and we'll report back to whatever they say in the posts and you can click over if you want to read that feedback that we get to them alright so I couldn't leave it it's such a cliffhanger because well I've spent the past couple days talking to all the manufacturers and here's a short brief little description of what I found out most importantly I found out that what we did was wrong so the first thing I did was I called Magnum and they said there's a 40 amp max on there 12 volt inverters and they recommended we look into a soft start so I said okay a soft start what the heck is that called Coleman Mach which is the company that makes the AC had a nice conversation with them they recommended a power saver model of their AC unit but they also said they have worked with a soft start company called the soft start company found out we can reduce the locked rotor amps by 50 to 75% by installing a soft start and I know this sounds like gibberish but it's all very interesting I've outlined it in the post you can read more in depth about it but it's just been man I talked to lathy onyx about the batteries they said no problem yes the more you use your batteries the the less the less life cycles we'll have but what we did did not harm them in any way so really based on the tests that we just did the only thing that was wrong was we didn't have a soft sir a soft start installed on the air-conditioning unit I'm excited though because when we started this project I thought there's no way it's gonna work and now I think it's totally possible 100% possible back to the regular ending maybe oh but until then I mean we're going to sit here it doesn't enjoy our lemonade in our air-conditioned ac3 all the characters here Oh

Channel: Gone with the Wynns

Views: 749,823

Keywords: Gone With the Wynns, the Wynns, solar, air conditioner, Runs Air Conditioner on Solar, RV Solar, RV AC, RV Air Conditioning, Off the Grid, Off the Grid AC, AC, Tiny House, Boat, Sailboat, Keep Cool, Is it Possible to Run the AC on Solar Power, Solar Power Air Conditioner, Lithium Battery, Outback, yacht, Best

Id: B0rZY5uotKI

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2016