Dual Solar Panel Setup - One Fixed, One Portable

[trevor.aaron]

Hi there, looking for some helpful tips and advice for a dual solar panel setup, one fixed to the roof of our Camper Van, and one portable, so we can move it into the sun when we need to.

Question - Will this plan work, and are there any pitfalls we should be aware of? If this plan won't work, what would you recommend?

Plan - Mount one panel to our camper van via wiring them into an extension cable (Windy Nation PV cables with a MC4 connectors). When we want to add the second panel, we wire it in parallel by disconnecting the fixed panel from the Windy Nation extension cable, and add a branch connector which then has both the fixed panel, and the portable panel, all coming into the branch connector that then runs into the extension cable all the way to the Victron Charge Controller.

Setup:
Two solar panels, 100W (12 volt extremely flexible monocrystalline)
Victron Charge Controller (100/30)
Windy Nation 10AWG PV cable, with a 15A inline fuse for each panel
BougeRV Solar Branch Connectors (best I could find online.... I want to get Renogy ones when they come back in stock)

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[12VoltInstalls]

No reason why that wouldn’t work. I’d leave a couple MC4 dongles through a ‘gland’ down low and not unplug the other panel if it were me.

 

[Isla]

It’ll work, a solar panel with around 100-watt power is capable of producing around 6 amps per peak-sun-hour on average and it can also be translated to around 30 amp-hours daily. In that case, you will most likely need 2 solar panels of around 100 watts each in order to recharge or give full power to your RV on an average day.