Need Help With Solar Vendor

Anytime 2wolves. Sounds like you're another early riser. 

RPods have a 20000 btu furnace, meaning that it burns 20000 btu of propane per hour of operation. Propane contains 91600 btu per gallon. So the furnace will consume 1 gallon of propane in about 4.5 hours of operation. A full 20 lb cylinder contains 4.7 gallons, which will give you about 21 hours of furnace runtime. The fridge, water heater, and stove in comparison use a tiny amount of propane so you can ignore that.

Actual days of operation on a cylinder will depend on the furnace duty cycle, which is a lot harder to estimate.. You’ll see a huge difference between furnace usage at 4 degrees vs 40. Around 3x the heating requirement depending on where you set your thermostat . I doubt the furnace would even keep up at 4 degrees, travel trailers aren’t very well insulated. You’d be going through a cylinder in a day probably.

For the kind of 3-4 season camping you’re describing you should take a second propane cylinder with you, many of us do, Myself included. Last thing you want is to run out at 2am on a cold night, an hour out in the boonies from the closest place to swap a cylinder. You can either mount the second cylinder on the tongue or just carry it (upright and secured) in your tow vehicle. If you mount it on the tongue you can install an automatic changeover so you don’t have to go outside and fool with propane cylinders in the middle of a cold night. Luxury!

Just a sidebar comment, while camping at sub freezing temps be sure to keep your rPod winterized. The furnace won’t keep your water systems from freezing up, large parts of them aren’t in the heated space.

Back on your electric power system one other consideration is to take a portable generator with you. You can still use solar most of the time when available and keep the generator for backup and for cloudy weather, shady campsites etc. it’s also the only semi- practical solution if you want to run your air conditioner some of the time while boondocking in the summer. And you can kick it on a couple times a day for a few minutes of microwave operation as well.

A good year round 3+ season boondocks setup for the southeast/mid Atlantic is dual batteries, dual propane cylinders, 100-120 watts solar, and a 2300 watt inverter/generator. Provides for lots of flexibility at a reasonable weight and price point. Just my opinion. And yes that’s overkill for west coast campers with less shady campsites, less cloudy weather, and low or no summer cooling requirements, or for folks who mostly camp with hookups.

Stephen, thank you so much for the info. I will not have temps down to 4 the worst probably 40, so hoping for 4 to 5 days.

Propane use varies with outside temperatures. In Spring or Fall, with some furnace use, I can get a number of days out of a 20 lb tank. When we were camping in the winter in 4F temperatures with wind chills in the definite negatives, I was lucky to get three days from a tank, and that was turning the furnace down at night to 60 and not turning it up over 68 during the day. That also included running the refrigerator, but that take so little gas that it is insignificant. The propane stove took more but we were sparing with use of it. Water heater use was later after we were in mostly above freezing temps where I could de-winterize.

Question. How many hours are you guys getting out of a 20 gallon tank? Also will my two group 24 with 200 watt solar run furnace and tv. I will switch to the 12volt. I will mostly be using fridge, tv, furnace. Boondockin 50% of time.
Again thank you!