This is super awesome! I do some overlanding/longer roadtrips in backcountry but have yet to gather the courage to install a solar system. Certainly bookmarking this for future reference :D
If you're going to do solar on an RV, you really should read Handy Bob Solar too [0]. The site formatting sucks, it's very much wall-o-text, and he's absolutely right in everything he says and rants about regarding RV solar.
Far too many solar installers just treat a system as the entry to people coming back for more, when the problem is that they don't know enough to adjust it properly for the stuff that was installed in the first place.
//EDIT: So, apparently, a site that's been static since 2011 and I've linked quite a lot over the years was updated again in 2020 with some ranting about Covid. You can safely ignore that, and read his older writings on solar installs, because just about everything he says about that is correct, at a "Spend five years hands on with solar and you'll eventually come to agree with him, no matter how loony he sounds about some of it when you start in."
Nice, someone with a non standard/officially approved opinion is a loony and is served with such epithets as "f*ck is with the antivax covid-hoax propaganda".
Read the rest about solar, I actually just grabbed it from my bookmarks and didn't realize he'd posted anything new since 2011. Ignore the first few posts and carry on reading his rants about solar, batteries, wire gauge, charge controller location, charging voltage, panel placement, shading, etc.
I've been dealing with an off grid solar office for 5+ years now. Year round power, heating (propane at times, candles/kerosene at others, electricity most of the time if I have the light), and have spent the bulk of this time in some esoteric backwaters communities on IRC with other people who do the same sort of thing.
It's really, really hard to find people who have written accurately about solar on the internet. What he said about solar, RV installs, battery charging, etc, is all 100% accurate. He deals with the broken installs by the places that advertise that they know what they're doing.
If you're willing to toss all that out based on more recent writings, it's your choice, but I try to judge writings based on their accuracy, not what I think about the person. You're entitled to judge writings however you want, but if you're considering off grid solar and write the guy's writings off, your loss.
How intelligent can the guy be when he's flagrantly demonstrating such flawed thinking? It calls into question everything he writes, full stop. Better things to do with my time and why give him more audience.
Intelligence has almost nothing to do with it. The whole 'rona thing has been very very stressful and many people have not reacted well to it. Scam artists have exploited this stress (as they always have and always will). Some people have been led astray and some are leading people astray, and some are both.
At any rate, it is an impairment of gathering and processing information correctly, not intelligence. It's a filter problem. I had a really hard time with this too, after seeing how people I previously respected dealt with this whole thing.
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For what it's worth - I'm strongly in favor of people choosing to get vaccinated and masking up in public. I despise the people who made this a wedge issue for their own benefit.
I also think that being self-righteous about it is very tempting but also very bad and destructive to discourse.
People who disregard everything someone has to say based on one belief are generally pretty stupid themselves. What an impressive way to discourage critical thinking.
I should judge the accuracy of what someone wrote nearly a decade ago by what I think of what I think they believe today?
It's a popular enough viewpoint today, certainly, but it leads to throwing out huge swaths of perfectly good work that could be useful. Obviously, I reject it. I don't know the guy, I don't know what's happened to him or not in the past decade since he was writing on the deep truths of RV solar. I do know that the more I learn about solar from hands on operation, the more his writings reflected what I'd found through experimentation/analysis/etc. You could apply plenty of his rantings to some of the off-grid battery destroying systems presented on YouTube as Grade A Amazing builds and improve a lot on those systems.
But, if you're only willing to consider the viewpoints of those you would consider show clear thinking, which largely translates to "agrees with what I already think," you're welcome to go through life that way. I tend to find that dreadfully boring and a good way to miss an awful lot of really solid knowledge. I'm happy to learn about lead acid battery quirks from people who've lived with lead acid for half as long as I've been alive, even if I think they make some pretty dumb decisions in life. I know they question some of my decisions back.
Anyway, your mind is clearly settled and the issue is closed on this particular bit of writings. You might go find some of SunKing's rants about "max smoke charging" useful as well, if you're dealing with off grid lead, but I guarantee you won't like him much as a person either.
There are many intelligent people who purport to be Christian/Muslim/etc, which all require severely flawed thinking to seriously believe.
What you’re doing is conducting an ad hominem attack, assuming that this dude’s views on one topic have any relevance to the accuracy of a completely different topic (with a nearly decade gap nonetheless).
Do you ensure that every bit of material that you read isn't written by someone who also has some really stupid and harmful beliefs about some other topic?
> Do you ensure that every bit of material that you read isn't written by someone who also has some really stupid and harmful beliefs about some other topic?
Everyone makes mistakes, and I've been known to rescind my references and recommendations upon making such discoveries.
In this case all it takes is simply loading the referenced page, the hogwash is front and center. Give me a break.
> ... and I've been known to rescind my references and recommendations upon making such discoveries.
Why?
If person A makes some claim about subject X at some point in time, and you find it true and worth sharing, what then makes their claims invalid if you discover later that person A believes something you find distasteful? If their statement about X was true at the point in time it was made, is it any less true if you discover you can't stand the person?
What if you read a book by someone who makes well written arguments and an enjoyable read, and then attend a book signing years later and realize that they have rancid BO or something, and are oddly vocal about [insert some fetish you find exceedingly disgusting here]? Does the character of the author you discover later impact the arguments in the previous book?
It's a really odd and, IMO, exceedingly broken filter for what sources of information you're willing to consider. It makes it really easy to never go outside your own head, because anyone who believes all the same things you do can't have anything terribly interesting to teach you, and anyone who believes different things can be spun as somehow abominable.
I'm not nearly so arrogant as to think I know everything. I'm certain there are things I'm wrong about, though I've no idea what they are at the moment. I'm equally certain that I have rather different opinions about subjects than many of the people I interact with, either in person or online. Some of them make for interesting conversations (I prefer a fire pit, pipe or cigars, and a bit of whiskey to make things civil), some of them we simply agree not to discuss, and that's fine.
> I've been known to rescind my references and recommendations upon making such discoveries
You understand that most everybody who was born in the first part of the 20th century or earlier believed quite a few things that we now consider pretty abhorrent.
I've driven something like 60,000 off-road miles since I bought my first truck in 2005. For overlanding, all you really need is a one big, high quality battery. The Odyssey PC2150 series are great batteries. Not cheap, but fantastic. It's very difficult to kill one.
Also, you'd be surprised how little energy you actually use out there. A quality fridge-freezer like an Engel or ARB can be run for days before it will discharge the battery in a parked truck enough to not turn the starter. This scenario pretty much never happens, so get a good battery, a good fridge, and you'll be fine.
Out of curiosity how far off grid do you go in your truck. That is, how far by distance and time are you away from the grid and stores? I know little about this stuff but am interested and would appreciate any helpful resources or videos you know of for a newbie. I’m interested from an overlanding / camping perspective but also a bug out vehicle perspective.
There's only so far you can get off-grid in the USA. The most remote is probably the Owyhee Desert, which is centered around the intersection of Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho. Out there, you can easily go 80-100 miles off pavement, sometimes further.
Another similarly remote place is the Arizona Strip, the portion of the state that lies north of the Grand Canyon. You access it from Utah and it's 95 miles from the outskirts of Hurricane, UT to SB Point, above the canyon.
Generally, we stay out for about a week and half and come in to town every 2-3 days, mostly for gas. We run Engel fridge/freezers, which give you essentially unlimited cold drinks and the only real limitation is space for fresh food.
It is an interesting feeling when you are truly bugging out or off the grid, almost a primal kind of thing, because instances where self reliance is the only thing left is becoming less and less of an occurrence. If you ever go camping in the wilderness by yourself and set in for the night alone, you probably know the feeling!
