Have a question for RV setup's wanting some info?

You are not a candidate for solar as your power requirements way beyond solar. You would need a 18-wheeler to carry all the batteries and panels around with you to power up those Air Conditioners. That is why you have a generator and 50 Amp Shore Service Connection.

not wanting to go off grid just wanting to cut my bill

Impossible with off-grid. Anything you take off grid is going to cost you at least 10 times more than what you can buy it for. On average a Kwh in the USA cost 12-cents. Battery cost alone is up around 60-cents over the life of the battery.

So you have a choice. You can pay the mean ole nasty greedy Power Company (POCO) 12-cents per Kwh , or your nice honest Green Energy company over $1.20 per Kwh. I will take the Mean Ole Greedy POCO every day.

The economical, practical way to cut your power bill when you have grid access is to use a grid tie inverter (GTI) to supplement the power coming from the grid. In effect you are using the grid as a battery and selling excess power back to POCO during the day and buying what you need from POCO at night.
Unfortunately for you, grid tie requires an interconnect agreement with POCO, permanent wiring, and an inspection by the local authority regulating electrical systems (the Authority Having Jurisdiction or AHJ).
Since you are going to be moving around, sometimes running your generator and sometimes using a shore connection GTI is just not an option for you.

If it were not for the cost and weight of batteries, etc, you might be a candidate for using an off-grid inverter with generator support capability. But that would not help when you were plugged into shore power and would also probably not be economical for only limited generator use.
Conservation is probably your best option, including using the most efficient A/C you can get, insulating well and making use of shade, and using fluorescent (not necessarily CFL) or LED lighting.

Been a while since I went to a RV camp site to tough it out with Air Conditioning and refrigeration, but those times that I have the camp site charged a flat daily fee of around $5 to $8 per day regardless of how much or how little power is actually used. In fact last time I did that last November it cost $11 per day to park the RV, and electric hookup was included whether you used it or not.

So that's the only answer out there I am not an candidate,,, I am not wanting to go 100% just help and cut the cost... but I can see from the short answers that this is a bubby site,,, sorry I joined, yalls little group, I have been a mod at many sites, for many different things and I CAN SAY I DONT WANT OR NEED ANY ADVICE FROM PEOPLE THAT HUG UP ON THEERE SELF.......

DONT WORRY ABOUT SHUNNING ME OR BANNING I WANT BE BACK AND I WILL SPREAD THE WORD....

its wild I see others on this site doing what I am wanting to do. why the neg response,,,, not very good for help, if you don't have anything good to say then do me a favor and don't post to my questions!!!!!!

It's unclear to me what your goal is?

Solar on an RV is a luxury not a money saver.

One 15k btu Ac uses about 1900w.... Where are you going to put 4kw of panels?

How much extra weight can you haul after your rig is full? You need need some heavy batteries, guessing 2500lbs.

In summery it will cost more than your RV.

If you don't want to run your AC that changes things. If you would like you can look at my thread to see a decent setup looks like, it's called "custom high end trailer build." For perspective I have about $9,000 in my electrical setup (solar, inverter, batts, etc)

As Dave told you to actually save you money it needs to be grid connected and used every day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week an din about 7 to 15 years you can save some money. Your RV will be part of a beer can 7 to 15 years down the road.

What you are not understanding is power from an Off-Grid battery system is extremely expensive and very inefficient. If you were to use all the potential power possible you would be paying at least 10 times more for power than what you can buy it for from the power company. However in an RV you will not be able to use it everyday, and in an RV you cannot park it in a location that will yield decent solar isolation unless you happen to park it in a Walmart parking lot and set up camp. A solar system must have complete view of the horizon to the east, south and west out in the blazing hot sun. Do you park out in full sun, or in the shade with trees around?

However it is not possible to use the system every day in an RV and that only escalates the cost from 10 times more to something like 20 to 100 times more for electricity. So whan you say all you want to do is shave some cost is only fooling yourself, not us. I repeat there is no possible way for you to save one single penny.

After being an Electrical Engineer for over 30 years I got an idea of what those air conditioners use in a day. You are looking at 10 to 20 Kwh per day. So let's say you want to shave just 1 single Kwh per day you are looking at investing $2000 to $3000 dollars of equipment. That 1 Kwh per day if bought cost 12-cents. Of that $2000 to $3000 the battery cost is $1000, and that battery has to be replaced every few years at higher cost.

So do some quick math and make some assumptions. Here are mine for a cost analysis. Battery life 3 years, system used 60 days per year or 180 days in 3 years when it is time to replace the battery. Battery cost $1000. In 3 years at 1 Kwh per day in 3 years you use 180 Kwh. Some quick math tells you you spent $1000 / 180 Kwh = $5.55 per Kwh. You could have bough the same power for $22.

So get mad and leave and find a site that will tell you what you want to hear. A good one to try is Arizona Sun & Wind forum. There they will tell you whatever you want to hear, then sell you everything you need to make it happen. Here nothing is for sale, and no endorsements. So I stick with my original comment. You are not a candidate for solar as you just use way too much energy.

I will let you in on another secret you will hate to hear and really piss you off. Buy you a battery isolator for the RV and use it to charge the house batteries from the vehicle alternator. The vehicle alternator can generate more electricity in 30 minutes than a RV loaded with panels in a week. That tells you to start with installing a Battery Isolator, a $50 dollar device that does more work than $2000 worth of panels.

The people that come here with RV questions are dry campers who do not use air conditioning or have the luxury of a hook-up where they camp. All they needs is lights, TV, and enough to run a coffee pot in the mornings. They use LPG for cooking, heat, and food refrigeration. They typically use less than 1 Kwh per day. Most all use the Battery Isolator and a generator to generate the bulk of the power, and use solar to supplement so they do not have to start the RV or generator everyday and disturb the quite.

To get the comforts of home like Air Conditioning, you are going to have to use an RV park with hook-ups, or a generator. Your RV is not large enough to carry all the panels to do what you want, and there would be no savings if you tried. So if your objective is to save money, forget it. Will not happen.

Do us a favor and read - You have not seen others doing what you are talking of.

FlyLow tells it well. You do not replace shore power with solar - you change your life style greatly and then solar may be possible.

Anyone that wishes can reply to any post - if you don't like it you can use the ignore feature but that is not wise.

my advice is to get at a minimum a 240 watt panel, if I can put that large panel on the roof of my small astrovan you can easily fit several on your RV. That would be a good starting point anything smaller will at most only give you 6 amps which takes forever to charge your battery. With 240 watts you get about 12 amps when the sun is overhead, most of the time when the sun is out you get at least 5 amps. Dont worry about where you live etc, when the sun comes out you get something.

On my van I'm 100 percent off grid, my "house" (145 amp agm) battery never see's shorepower or alternator power or even gas generator, its all solar. I can run a 12 volt fridge, all my lights, cook with my roadpro 12 volt cooker, charge laptops/cellphones, and most important run my 12 volt swamp cooler all day long. I can even charge my cordless work tools. 240 watt gives you real power for the basics, it wont run air conditioners or power a plasma TV but I can watch TV on my netbook all day long and all night long if I wanted to. I produce more power than I use with the controller float charging by noon every day.

Shorepower might be cheap to some but solar power is even cheaper once you make the initial investment. For me 200 dollar for the panel, 102 for the ecoworthy mppt controller, and 125 for the battery.

I never discourage anyone from going on solar, I actually highly recommend it. I see many people with their large RV's and not a single solar panel on all that wasted space. Like I tell everyone if I had more space on my roof I would put another 240 watt panel on it. You can never have too much amps. Some people say the panels create drag on the freeway, I never notice any difference in gas mileage, if it did I would put wind deflectors.

see

Please see my pic's email if you want info

We have solar for the trailer, the expense and effort were worth it because we don't use camp grounds. It allows us to use anything but the air for weeks at a time and we don't take the generator unless we know it will be too hot or cloudy for extended periods. This is our second season with solar and we haven't needed it yet.

With hook ups I suppose you could save some by shutting of the converter and letting the solar/batteries run the basic rig functions while the pole takes care of the 120v items. As mentioned though, it would take a long time before you saved enough to pay for the system.

I'm currently in Europe on Vacation. From the top deck of the ship I'm on, I can see all the campers drive by. Nearly all of them have around a 100-160W single panel on them... They all look factory installed. Just an interesting observation.

NONE of them have AC units on them.

I plan to do solar on my rig as well, 360-480W worth, but it is for the times in winter when I plan to dry camp with no shade and not need the AC. When I am in the desert in the spring and fall, using the AC, I will run my genset.

You will need to adjust your lifestyle when using Solar, Just like you have to with the fresh water and waste capacity...

Listen to these guys. The answers are short, but until they know what you want to accomplish, you will not get the answers you need.

If you plan to run the AC units with solar, they are right, you can forget it. It's all governed by the laws of physics.

Good Luck with your install.