My wife and I have owned two different Oliver Travel Trailers since early 2008. The first Oliver Elite did not have any fancy (LiFePO4) batteries nor did it have any way to charge the two existing AGM batteries other than the onboard charger that had to be connected to 120 VAC. Needless to say, we were constantly monitoring our usage and always making sure to use our battery power efficiently.
In early 2014, we upgraded to the larger Oliver Elite II. This one was equipped with rooftop solar but still had AGM’s for battery power. Having solar was nice, as we were never campground enthusiasts. Now we could camp wherever we stopped for the night and not be reliant on the grid to recharge our batteries. This scenario worked well for us, until it didn’t.
During a two week trip to Arkansas, five straight days of gray skies sent us in search of a link to the grid. We were getting some power from the solar panels but where we were parked there was too much overhead foliage to allow enough of the limited sunlight to do us much good.
In early 2021 our AGM’s began to fail and, as I had always planned, I replaced them with Lithium’s. This has proven to be a real game changer for us as we are now more relaxed in our use of the batteries. But, having more battery power has inevitably led us to use more of what we have available. If we use lots of amp hours during the night it takes longer to recharge the batteries the next day and that’s assuming there’s good sunshine.
I soon realized that solar panels installed flat on the rooftop were convenient because they were always deployed and working, but they were terribly inefficient because they were NEVER properly aimed at the sun. That issue is the panel needs to have an azimuth of a perfect 90-degree angle to the sun and an elevation that is equal to your latitude and have the ability to automatically maintain that relationship to the sun constantly.
Up until now, there was no way to obtain this capability. But now there is SolarMaXX RV a new company that include camping enthusiasts and engineers have conceived, designed and built a portable ground based system that will use a 200 watt, 24 volt solar panel and automatically track the sun with a proven efficiency rate of at least 2X that of a flat panel during the exact same time period. Using a 24 volt system allows for a longer wire run from the camper to the tracker without the usual voltage drop incurred with a 12 volt system.
I became involved with the group in 2019 through one of the founders who is a fellow camper. They have graciously kept me abreast of its evolution through its several iterations of development. This past January, I was asked to take a pre-production prototype on our annual foray out to the southern Arizona desert for some testing under real camping conditions.
Upon arrival, I deployed the unit and attached it to my batteries. Since the unit is equipped with its own MPPT controller, I didn’t have to do any additional wiring. I turned the unit on and set it to tracking mode. It sat there for about 10 seconds and began to turn itself toward the sun. The unit has built in GPS so it always knows its location and the time of day. It also has an on-board almanac that knows what time the sun will rise and set. Using this data, it found the sun, set the proper elevation of the panel and began to track. About every four minutes the tracker would change its azimuth about one degree in its constant chase of the sun. As the sun rose higher in the sky the elevation of the panel changed to maintain the perfect alignment. At the end of the day when the sun had dropped behind the mountains to the west, the tracker retracted the panel and went to sleep for the night. When the first rays of the sun appeared in the eastern sky the next morning, the tracker woke up and spun around to again follow the sun’s daily sojourn across the sky.
I had the tracker set up in the desert for a total of about a week and the on-board computer and software performed exactly as designed.
They have a wheel-tire combo that has a removable tire that can be swapped out with different treads for different surfaces. The desert where we were parked generally requires a heavier tread than would be needed on turf or concrete.
For those of us that like to camp off grid for extended periods of time, this is an absolute game changer. By maximizing the amount of energy collected from the sun, it will recharge your battery bank much faster. Even if you already have a rooftop mounted system this will work in perfect sync with it without any additional modifications to your wiring system. You may simply use the enclosed alligator clips to directly connect the system to the batteries or connect via a standard solar port. Set up and initiation of the system should take only a few minutes and once done, you don’t have to touch it again until you are ready to move on to your next destination.