Need help sizing my solar/electrical system

Been researching for so long and there's so much info out there I'm having a hard time figuring out what I need for my specific needs. I want to power in my micro-camper van: a Maxx Air Deluxe fan (8hrs/night), 4-6 three watt puck lights (a couple hours/evening), a Dometic CFX3 34 or 45 cooler (running round the clock but only comes on sporadically as a fridge does), ability to charge 2 iPhones (once/night), and 1 MacBook Air (once/day). What size components do I need? Other online calculators like from faroutride.com and explorist.life say I would need 175 watt solar, 100ah lithium battery, and a minimum 650 watt inverter. Is this right?

I also want an isolator to run off my car's alternator while driving and a safety shut-off for the whole system.

Thanks!
Shlomy

Please drop the power rating(watts) of the appliances listed above

Topmaike007 said:

Please drop the power rating(watts) of the appliances listed above

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Thanks for chiming in Topmaike007!

For all of my DC appliances: Finding wattage for DC appliances has been very challenging via the internet (except for the puck lights I plan to use, rated at 3W). The most I've been able to gather is the number of amps each appliance will draw. I've put the number of amps and number of hours each day I plan to use each appliance and thereby determined my Amp hours (Ah) for each appliance and came up with the total below. So in order to know the watts for each appliance I would have to convert amp hours to watts somehow?

For all of my AC appliances: I do have the Watt ratings. Those have been easy to find for the most part.
Laptop: 45 Watts, estimated use: 1.5 hours/day or night
Nutribullet Blender: 600 Watts, estimated use 3-5 minutes/day or 0.083 hours/day

So I used an online calculator and my daily usage for all DC and AC appliances will be around 53 Ah. Do you need a breakdown of how many amp hours each appliance will use? Or a breakdown of watt hours? Or just watts? Thanks for being willing to help.

• Inverter: size this based on the max power you will use at any 1 time + some overhead
• Solar: This depends on your situation, location, etc.To get a ballpark for how much power a panel or array might generate on an average sunny day I use the formula: [PV array wattage] x 0.7 x 5hrs. This is just the formula I use, and isn't necessarily the right one or the best one, it assumes 70% efficiency and 5 hours of sun, which are just ballpark estimates.

Based on your estimate of 53ah usage per day, 200-400 watts sounds reasonable. Based on my formula 200w would cut it, but as I said there is no special validity to my numbers, and more solar would mean that you would generate more on overcast days.

To calculate watt hours from amp hours simply multiple by 12.8 if your battery is 12v or 25.6 if your battery is 24v. So your estimated 53 Ah daily usage is roughly 680 Wh a day. That's the minimum you would need to generate every day to replenish what you consume.