Wind Turbine's are a complete waste of time and energy, from small to large. The ROI is to long. Solar is hands down a better producer of power.
Great, show me the money. How many miles were added in two days charging?
LOL, are you like this in real life? I doubt it, nobody can function with social skills this poor. It's only on the internet where people can pretend role play as a boss. Seems to be a pattern with you.
?You really are a tool ?
CIGS panels are here! Did a prelim test today, got 6 miles on a partly cloudy day (although it mostly cleared up after 3pm), which is less than the 12 miles (as calculated) with the other setup using folding panels which had more surface area and was tested on a full sun day.
Still working on a number of things but will do a detailed writeup in the coming weeks. Challenges mentioned weren't hard to overcome, just took a little engineering (real engineering, not internet expert engineering, lol). One thing I will do with the top row panels is run them just past the tonneau applique to create an "awning" and solve the dreaded water intrusion problem!
Final form envisioned (for now at least) is the top row bonded to the roof, 1 panel on the frunk (feeding the low wattage 5521 input on the "solar generator"), and the bottom row of panels mounted to a movable Aluminum panel that will be held just bellow the tonneau. Rolling up the tonneau will expose the bottom row.
MC4 connectors will be removed and replaced with low profile flat wiring, with black trim to clean up the look and seal the edges of the panels which are prone to delamination. Anybody doing this and expecting 10 years of life from the panels will be disappointed. As mentioned in the OP, we gotta calibrate expectations when dealing with solar on vehicles.
The onboard integrated panels should provide ~8 miles/day when finished, and will require zero setup. When boondocking, my plan is to supplement them with panels set up on the ground. I got ~3kW of foldable solar panels that would take up half the bed (folded), and provide ~40 miles/day. Realistically, I would probably need half that for most of my trips.
Turns out controlling everything remotely worked fine. Using the Pecron app with Starlink, and the Tesla app, I could control everything from my phone. Was able to maximize charge rate (3kW) to reduce overhead, monitor state of charge of "solar generator", and turn off inverters when not charging to reduce drain. My use case is boondocking though, so doing it manually is fine for me also. Scheduling the charging during peak hours to balance the inflow/outflow can reduce/eliminate the need for multiple start/stops.
Sidenote: Always a good idea to check your panels for hot spots while in the return window. Easily done with a thermal imager if you have one.
The biggest issue is just the amount of battery and power needed to do anything for the truck.
I believe that I can definitively say that it won't work. And FYI DC-DC conversion has pretty much the same efficiency that AC-DC or DC-AC inverters do. And with today's inverter, they are all well above 90%, often 97%+. You aren't really losing much.
