Ruby M. & Matt D. Smith's RV – A Powerful Power Station
Ruby M. & Matt D. Smith. We both stay in the rolling foothills of Appalachia in the upstate of South Carolina. We are full time nomads with our upgraded Fleetwood Prowler fifth wheel camper. I've heard it been said before that no one lives in a camper year round because of the seasonal extremes you would have to endure. Thanks to Power Queen that's nowhere close to the truth.
Our home while modest is an extremely robust power plant thanks to Matt's greenSTEM career path, we have (8) 300W [18.8V,16A] solar panels on the roof wired in 4P2S configuration for 37.6V and 64A output wired into a generic 100 amp 24V automatic charge controller with a super efficient mppt algorithm. This of course feeds our battery bank that consists of (4) 12V 100Ah lifepo4 batteries from Power Queen wired in 2S2P for 24V and 200Ah. The final layer of our solar generator is built around a neat little project Matt couldn't go without; a 20 2.7V 500F super capacitor bank wired in 10S2P with a blocking diode between it and our Power Queen battery bank leading to about 320 ohms of resistance and our DC distribution panel and our 24V 4000W inverter which wires into our AC distribution panel.
While our Power Queen battery bank is stocky on its own it felt like a good idea to give ourselves a bit of cushion during days of autonomy, the capacitor bank itself provides roughly 5 hours of energy to our LED lights before the battery bank gets depleted even 1% not to mention all those capacitors offer a world of benefit with stabilizing the output of the batteries and reducing oscillation in our system.
Amazingly the whole set up works flawless in our humble 30 amp camper. During the day we run everything from the microwave to our televisions and even the air conditioner or electric oil furnace depending the season without any concerns because of our massive solar production and at night we still have absolutely no concerns. Power Queen effectively runs our inverter very efficiently all night long when we want to have a movie night. We don't even have a back up generator and of course we've been off grid for years now.
We have a bit of an odd hobby and one day while helping someone repurpose construction materials we found the packaging for a Power Queen 12.8V mini battery along with the sticker pack and booklet manual. We were immediately impressed that 100 amp hours could even come in such a small power cell and we found it hard not to be green with envy because at the time we had just two 95Ah lead acid batteries that we constantly drained and eventually ran through the life cycles of very quickly there after. It was about a year and a half later after the hurricane Helene disaster that we needed a new solution to our electrical utility and we remembered the mini battery and started looking for the most cost effective and powerful solution to our dilemma. We bought our storage capacity from Power Queen and were amazed with the weight!
I would always recommend Power Queen for anyone asking about solar storage, back up energy solutions and emergency preparation they absolutely are the lead in value and power.
