How many watts of solar charging for tourism

We tend to hover right around 2 kWh (2,000 watt hours) per day for two adults. When scoping out your RV solar setup, the logical place to start is with the panels. The capacity of a solar panel is measured in watts, with the advertised number of watts being the amount of power you can pull in during perfect conditions.

A good rule-of-thumb is that a 100-watt solar panel will generate about 30 amp-hours (approximately 350 watt-hours) per day. With this in mind, you can take your total daily energy consumption and divide it by 350 to get an estimate of how many 100-watt solar panels you need. Let's look at our previous example.

A 300 amp-hour camper battery, for instance, would need around 300 watts of solar power. Also keep in mind that solar panels experience a 75-90% drop in efficiency on cloudy days, so it's good to have slightly more than you need when it comes to solar power (about a 20% cushion, if possible, to account for less-than-ideal conditions).

The capacity of a solar panel is measured in watts, with the advertised number of watts being the amount of power you can pull in during perfect conditions. Because perfect conditions rarely exist, you should expect to max out at 80-90% of the advertised watts on sunny, summer days (it will be even lower in the winter).

Most people assume that if they have a 100-watt solar panel in the sun for an average of eight hours during the day, it will produce 800 watt-hours of energy (100 watts X 8 hours = 800 watt-hours). In reality, weather, time of year, and location all impact the efficiency of solar panels.

Buy on Amazon Price & availability info updated 2025-05-04 at 15:35. Once you know your power usage (in amp-hours), multiply it by 2-3 to get the total watts of solar you need to install. Then divide that number by the wattage output of the panels you plan to install. For example, 400 Watts of solar ÷ 100 Watt panel output = 4 panels needed.