One of the challenges of living with solar exclusively is collecting enough power to make it all the way through the night. Especially for night owls like us who use a lot of power in the evening editing videos, working on books, and watching the occasional movie.
David discovered on a two-week vacation at Assateague National Park that we ran out of power just shy of dawn on several days. Even though he had the clever solution to jump-start the solar system using the power hookup to our SUV and idling the engine for 20 minutes, we really are trying to be generator and mechanical engine free on our vacations so as not to disrupt our neighbors. David’s actually working on a different solution to this problem, which we will feature in its own future video once he works out all the kinks (and possibly submits a patent).
In the video linked below, David describes our flexible solar panel installation on the nose of our camper. We used otherwise empty space to make more power to get through the day. We have future plans to add a similar setup to the tail of our camper (also unused space) to gather just enough extra power that we can sleep in every day of every off-grid vacation.