On Feb 1, 8:26 am, "BDS" wrote:
That might not work so well in an application like this. If he has the 250
watt heater and runs it for 3 hours then he has removed 750 watt-hours of
energy from the battery (plus change).

A typical solar panel charger is meant for trickle charging and they only
put out something like 10 watts or less, although I've seen some up around
20 watts. That means that it will take 75 hours of charging time at 10
watts to replace that 750 watt-hours, and that's at 100% efficiency which,
as well all know, doesn't exist.

There's a guy with a solar-power setup on the ramp but I've never been
able to run into him to pick his brain. A friend heard that he has his
thing patented so I might get little info other than a price... I
researched the solar powered thing briefly but stopped after the
numbers on the napkin hit 4-digits to the right of the dollar sign.


Most of these deep cycle cells are looking for a charge at around 20 amps
for 10 hours or so to bring them up to full charge, and then a float charge
to hold the terminal voltage around 13.8 volts.

Either a generator or a propane-fired pre-heater is the way to go here.

Yeah, I think a generator is the ideal thing. Plus, I can use it for
many different applications as well.