Now that I have moved my NA to an RV storage yard for the Summer I am gaining growing confidence that I can leave the coach fully powered without shore power sustained by the 1kW solar array on the roof.
For the last several weeks I have been closely monitoring the coach with all the internet features, leaving the coach fully powered with inverter running and the Samsung refrigerator on.
The coach is located near the Pacific Ocean so there are many days the marine layer stays over the coach yielding only 40% of normal solar energy at mid day. Given it is June when the Sun is directly over head the solar panels will put out the rated power of 1kW at noon but on overcast days I typically see around 400 watts maximum. With all of the swings in solar output the batteries have so far always recovered to 100% SOC by around noon at the latest.
In order to better understand the solar energy falling on the coach I have installed a great little internet based weather station on the roof. The
Ambient Weather WS-2902A is fully WiFi and ties into the WiFi Ranger Pro updating weather conditions once a minute.
Once nice feature about this weather station is that it tracks solar radiation in watts/m3 allowing me to compare with the actual output of the panels on the coach. If solar radiation, for whatever reason, is not keeping up with the power demands of the coach I will know it before the batteries are depleted. As I covered in a previous post the only important parameter I cannot see on the internet from the coach is the current SOC of the house batteries. That would require another module from Victron.
It is interesting to watch the history from the weather station when the coach is moving. Regularly seeing winds up to 70 mph. Weather station seem to tolerate the wind just fine.
Here is a video showing the web page on the internet displaying the output of the weather station on the coach.
https://youtu.be/7f76Jtumz4k
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