Last night we had a rain storm roll through and we lost power at the house as the sun was setting. What a pain! This happens more often than we would like, but we’re out in the country and well, apparently it happens a lot according to the neighbours.

I was heading outside to the car in order to charge my phone and my garage light turned on. It’s solar powered, and the only thing that was providing light. We couldn’t cook dinner, and had no running water either as we’re on a well system, and it requires power too.

These are issues that I will not miss when moving into the RV. We will need to have a source of power though that is reliable, and as we’re not always going to be in areas where we can plug in during our travels, we need to get power another way, and that way is solar.

Looking at the roof on several of the trailers we were looking at yesterday, I should have a pretty good amount of space for solar panels. One looked like I could get nine or ten panels on the roof, which would be almost 3Kw of power, and that’s basically the average amount of power that many houses consume in a month from what I’ve read. We would even be able to run the air conditioner off that!

Buying a solar system would be a slower process due to cost and would have to wait until after we were already in the RV as there is no way we could actually buy it living in the house right now. Our rent and bills are taking up most of our money right now.

Once we’re in the RV, we’d have to make sure to park at places with full hookup until I can buy the panels. It shouldn’t be too hard to buy all the parts I require after about a month.

Now, it’s time to look into the kits, and there are several suppliers in the city.

One I’m looking at is solarwholsaler.ca which has a 500 watt kit for RV’s. Once it’s built, then it’s just a matter of adding more to it, or just building up right at the beginning.

Once I figure out which company will be the best to purchase from, I’ll post more about it, and give a review.