Solar to power house

[ytechie]

Something I’ve never seen discussed. Anyone ever put a beefy solar system on an RV, and then figure out how to hook it into the house when not traveling?

Pros:
* Can use the solar for boondocking AND house so it’s a better ROI
* If you sell your house, the solar goes with you to the next!
* Good excuse to go lithium ion and further decrease utility costs
* Doesn’t affect the look of your house

I just don’t know how you would actually do this. Ideally it would be a simple quick connect, and would automatically use the solar and batteries and fallback to utility power.

I’m not in a position to do this today, but maybe in the future.

[Clomok]

Run the inverter in the trailer, plug the house into the trailer, your not going to get nearly the real estate on a RV roof that you would on a house/shed though. Great thought though, defiantly interesting for a grid tie-in system

[keymastr]

Nice thought but the return on investment to do it safely would not work out without a lot more panels than an RV can hold. For starters you need automatic switching gear to disconnect your house from the grid when the power goes out or you could energize a line the utility is attempting to repair. They take that pretty seriously. You could power a separate outlet from the RV inverter but what would you run? Maybe watch some TV but is it worth setting it up?

[vsheetz]

I have done a bit of looking into this topic. I have 1500w of panels on the RV and 7000w of panels grid tied on our house. Would be nice to augment the house system with the additional 1500w from the RV when stored at home.

Google small grid tie inverters. Available are units with DC input and 115vac output. Typically they are expecting DC input in the 15-30vdc range. In my case I would need to switch the RV panels directly to the inverter or convert the RV battery bank to 24vdc and feed to the inverter.

I think doable.

[leadman]

I have thought of this also. I spend a lot of time in my garage so was thinking of installing 12v DC lights in the garage along with an invertor to run some small tools and maybe my swamp cooler. This would all be on a separate circuit so no feed back into the grid.

[MisterT]

Originally Posted by ytechie

Something I’ve never seen discussed. Anyone ever put a beefy solar system on an RV, and then figure out how to hook it into the house when not traveling?

Pros:
* Can use the solar for boondocking AND house so it’s a better ROI
* If you sell your house, the solar goes with you to the next!
* Good excuse to go lithium ion and further decrease utility costs

concerns:
- are you considering having a large 'beefy' battery bank and 'large' Inverter in your home or garage? Dreaming of Solar driving all of your home's needs is very much a dream, unless you have a LOT of solar on your home's roof, or in the yard, a LOT of battery amp hours, and a LARGE inverter system. The amount of 'roof' on your coach would never be even close enough.

- while you could simply disconnect your solar panel wiring from your coach's batteries, and attach them to your home's batteries, you would want to either be parked 'very' close to the house, or you would need some 'very' thick wiring to pass thru the majority of solar watts to the house batteries.

- a home would require a 'switch' or some type of 'Hybrid' inverter system to either disconnect your incoming solar power from the grid, or provide a way to offset incoming grid power by the amount of available solar power... not really an easy effort, and costly.

- while we think of Solar as a 'direct' power source, in most cases it actually is simply recharging a battery bank, which we then draw from.

...overall, the idea would be VERY costly, and probably not nearly as practical as we might dream.

just my thoughts : )
I have some solar, but it is simply to somewhat limit generator run time.