How to choose an RV solar kit

Most “best solar kit” lists rank panels the writer never mounted. The Megawatt solar calculator skips the ranking and starts where the answer actually lives: how many watt-hours you use in a day.

Start with your load

Pick a preset (luxury Class A, mid-size, or compact) and uncheck anything you won’t run off the batteries. Those presets are planning numbers James published, not a reading from your coach. The air conditioner box moves the result more than anything else, so be honest about it.

The math behind the pack size

The calculator divides your daily watt-hours by peak sun hours times 0.75, then rounds up to whole packs of 200, 400, 800, or 1,180 watts. The 0.75 covers heat, wiring, and charge-controller losses. So 2,400 Wh a day at 4 sun hours calls for 800 W of panel.

Those four packs are the only solar products Megawatt links, and each one has a card below.

Then measure the roof

Air conditioners, vents, and antennas eat roof space fast. The original calculator told you to check the layout before you buy, and that still stands. The solar planner draws your roof from the length and width you enter, so you can see whether the panels fit. Its panel footprint is a planning size you can edit, not a dimension off a product page.

Check a real week of sun

For a forecast instead of an average, open the solar forecast. It reads Open-Meteo’s irradiance for your ZIP code and applies the same 0.75 factor, so the numbers line up with the calculator.

Know when to hire it out

If the array gets big, or the battery calculator pushes you to 24 or 48 volts, hire the install. James lists one solar shop on the partners page, CCRV. We don’t rank installers.