What about Solar?

[Desertboater]

Does anyone have experience hooking up a relatively small solar panel and using that to charge a deep cycle auxiliary battery instead of going off of the alternator and through an isolator? it looks like it's around the same price and could last a bit longer...assuming it gives enough charge that you can consistanly use the battery.

Thanks,
West

[touringcamry]

The solar implementations that I've seen on the Internet are mainly used to keep the battery topped off and not for charging because of the limited power that is available. These systems were in fleet vehicles that might sit for weeks at a time. This removed the requirement for the fleet operator to start the car periodically to charge up the battery due to low drain from things like clocks, radios, and anything else that has volatile memory chips.

I think Mercedes at some point put solar panels in their sunroofs to power fans to keep the interior cool, but I don't know much about it.

I want to say you shouldn't expect more than about 5W current from the solar array, but I'm not really certain about that figure.