HOWEVER, it’s not this simple - of course not! Not 3 amps but SIX amps/day if we used an inverter.Īll inverters are different, but ALL inverters waste power. Let’s round it up to be safe and assume we use about a quarter of an hour of coffee amps per day or 3 amps. We each have 2 cups a morning, so 4 cups of coffee times 3 minutes per cup = 12 minutes of Keurig Coffee Maker use daily. But an individual cup of Keurig coffee doesn’t take an hour, so you have to determine how long each cup takes (approx 3 minutes) and do the math. So 1425 divided by 120 = approximately 12 amp hours PER HOUR. WATTS divided by VOLTAGE = AMPS is the formula. You can see that it uses 1425 watts and it’s 120 volts. As an example, look on the bottom of an appliance – here’s our coffeepot. Most packaging will contain the information you need, or often you can look it up online.
#AMP HOUR CALCULATOR HOW TO#
If you don’t know how to calculate amp usage for each individual thing that uses electricity, you’re going to have to be a bit of a sleuth – you need to find the watts and voltage for each light bulb, each appliance and so on. To do this, you must go through meticulously and calculate amp usage by hours used. The first step is to calculate how many amps you use daily. Why 50%? I don’t know, the manufacturers say it will extend the life of your batteries – which given the price of deep cycle batteries, we like more years rather than less. Between the two Group 27 batteries, we have somewhere around 200 amp hours.Ģ Group 27 wet cell deep cycle batteries = approx 200 amps, 100 of which is usable.īattery manufacturers recommend using 50% of your available battery capacity – so we have 100 available amp hours. When we started ordered our Lance 1685 (a 20’9″ travel trailer), we added a 2nd battery and upgraded both batteries to Group 27’s.
Unfortunately there’s no shortcut easy way to calculate this information - I can’t tell you because it’s vastly different for everyone.
Hopefully, this will help you think about your alternative energy needs BEFORE you go boondocking or dry camping and your furnace won’t run at 4 AM when its 24 degrees outside because you underestimated how many amps the furnace blower takes (or, like us, didn’t even realize the propane furnace needs electricity for the blower to function).īefore you can start to plan, you need an idea of how many amp hours of electricity you use each day. Determining RV amp usage can be very frustrating when your goal is to live by the sun and not have to run the generator!ĭISCLAIMER: I am NOT an electronics guru – I don’t really understand much more than basic principles.
#AMP HOUR CALCULATOR FULL#
If you're interested in learning more about solar, we would HIGHLY recommend checking out our DIY Solar Learning Center - packed full of valuable, FREE information on all things solar power.Whether aboard a cruising sailboat or in our Lance 1685 travel trailer, it seems like almost everyone, including us, underestimates the amount of electricity we use, especially when planning alternative energy. For step by step instructions on these calculations, read this guide here. Now that we know your average daily usage, we can start looking to calculate the right size battery bank and the number of solar panels you'll need to charge that battery bank. If it's minutes, do it as a percentage of 1 hour (ie. (Right click to open full-size image in new tab)Īdd up the totals for the two numbered columns (wattage & time) by multiplying the running watts by run time/day. Now that we have our columns, write down all of the appliances you plan on using + their average running wattage (from the chart) + for roughly how many minutes and/or hours per day you'll be using that appliance. Use the image below and make 4 columns (shown below): Appliance | Running Wattage | Run Time/Day (Hours) | Total If you'd like to know the EXACT watts of the specific appliance you're going to be using, you can usually find this on the back of most appliances, under their "energy use information" and you can enter these manually. We generally advise against adding any appliances that can be propane-fuelled, such as cooktops, hot water heaters and electric heat as these won't require any of the solar power we're harnessing. We created this off-grid solar load calculator in order to help you quickly and easily add up all of your daily energy consumption and get this total in watts.Ī couple points before we get started. No matter how big or how small, the first step is always calculating how many watts per day you will need. The first step in figuring out how many solar panels you need and what size of off-grid solar power system will work for you, is to know how much energy you use on a daily basis.
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