Solar power

We took a second Renogy 100 watt solar panel with us this trip, last trip we had 1 panel hooked up to our battery system using a cheap Harbor Freight 7amp charger and their thin 10 ft lead and we did ok we got 3.6 amps out of a 5.29 amp panel. This time we added Renogy "Y" connectors to tie the panels together and then added 20' lead wires in 10 ga wire and hooked up to our Bogart Engineering SC-2030 30 amp charger that is tied into our Bogart Engineering TM-2030-RV battery monitor and we saw a high of 10.8 amps.

The Harbor Freight charger and leads look to be about 16 ga so it lost power there and I had to use automotive style wiring connectors to hook to the solar panel so probably more loss there.

The new connectors are easy to use and I just run the wires out to the panels and plug them in.

We did have to fire up our generator to charge the batteries one time during our 8 night stay as we were down to about 80% capacity, so down about 92 amps and we kept getting to much cloud cover for the solar panels and the generator brought them back up to about 86% then the solar panels finished them off and we stayed on solar for the rest of the trip.

I had the Harbor Freight parts from another project already so I tried them out, but if I had not had them I would have waited for the better components the first time.