How Much Solar Do I Need to Work From My RV?

The short answer: to run a normal laptop-based mobile office on solar alone in an RV, most people need somewhere around 200 to 400 watts of panel feeding a battery of at least 1,000 watt-hours. That covers a laptop, a monitor, your networking gear, and internet through a solid work day in decent sun. The catch nobody mentions is that solar is the slow part of the system, and it won't touch your air conditioner. So the real question isn't "how many watts of solar." It's how many watt-hours you burn in a day, and how fast you can put them back. Here's how I run that math.

Start with your load, not the panel

Everybody shops for solar backwards. They pick a panel wattage first and then hope it's enough. Do it the other way around. Add up what your desk actually draws in a day, then size the panel to refill it. I think about power the way I'd think about a data center: know the load, size the supply, leave some headroom. Here's a realistic mobile-office day. I've hedged the draws, because every laptop and dish is a little different.

• Laptop: roughly 45 to 65 watts while you're working, so call it about 50W on average.
• External monitor: about 20 to 30 watts.
• Router and networking: around 10 watts.
• Starlink: roughly 50 to 75 watts for a standard dish, and noticeably less for the Mini. It runs longer than your work hours, so it ends up dominating the daily total.
• Phone and odds and ends: another 10 to 20 watts on and off.

Active desk draw lands around 130 to 200 watts while you're sitting there. Nobody works a flat eight hours, but Starlink and the fridge keep sipping after you close the laptop, so a fair daily budget for a working RV office is roughly 1,000 to 1,500 watt-hours. Write that number down. It's the target every panel and battery decision has to serve.

The solar math that actually holds up

A solar panel almost never gives you its sticker number. Heat, angle, haze, and a dirty surface all take a cut, so real-world output is usually 70 to 80% of the rated watts in good sun. And you only get strong sun for a handful of hours a day. Most RVers plan on 4 to 5 "peak sun hours" in a decent season, and less than that in winter or under trees. The planning formula that's never let me down is simple:

Daily watt-hours = panel watts x peak sun hours x 0.75

Run it and the picture gets honest fast.

• A 100W panel gives you 100 x 4.5 x 0.75, or about 340 Wh a day. That's a maintainer. It slows the drain but doesn't power the office.
• A 200W panel gets you to about 675 Wh a day. Now you're covering a light work day, if you're careful.
• A 400W panel lands around 1,350 Wh a day. That's the range that genuinely refills a full mobile-office day in good sun.

So when someone asks how much solar they need to work from an RV, the grounded answer is this. To replace a 1,000 to 1,500 Wh work day on sun alone, you want somewhere around 300 to 400 watts of panel, and a cloudy day will still blow a hole in that. Before you buy, plug your own location into the free NREL PVWatts calculator. It'll give you real peak-sun-hour numbers for where you actually park.

The battery is half the answer

Panels make power. Batteries let you use it after the sun drops. If your battery is too small, midday solar overflows with nowhere to go and you're dark by nine anyway. For a working office I'd want at least a full day of storage, so 1,000 watt-hours minimum, and 2,000 or more if two of you work.

The clean way to get the storage and the solar brain in one box is a portable power station with a real MPPT solar input. As of this writing, the EcoFlow DELTA 2 is a 1,024Wh unit that takes up to 500 watts of solar and pushes 1,800W AC, so it has the headroom to feed a 400W array and still run the whole desk. (Confirm the current specs on the product page, since EcoFlow revises the lineup.) If two of you work, look at the bigger DELTA 2 Max class, roughly 2,048Wh and about 1,000W solar input, so one bank covers two desks. Buy the storage to match your day, not the panel.

If you're mounting your own panels

Want to build it yourself? A 200W folding panel you can aim at the sun beats the same wattage lying flat on a hot roof, because you can chase the angle and keep it cooler. Wire it through a proper MPPT charge controller instead of the cheap PWM kind, so you squeeze the most out of every cloud-dodging hour. Two 200W folding panels in series is a common, sane way to hit that 400W target without drilling your roof.

The honest limit: air conditioning and clouds

I'll tell you what I told readers in You Don't Need Shore Power. No reasonable amount of RV solar runs a rooftop air conditioner all afternoon. An A/C compressor is a huge, sustained draw. Solar trickles power in over hours, and the A/C wants it all at once. For heat you still need a generator or shore power. I keep only 100 watts on my own roof as a maintainer and lean on the generator for the heavy lifting. If you want to see what that fuel actually costs, I ran the numbers in Generator Math.

One more field note. Keep your internet on a battery buffer instead of running it straight off the panels. Solar output swings every time a cloud passes, and that flicker is exactly what drops a Starlink dish. Running the dish off the battery in the middle gives it clean, steady power. That's the setup I walk through in My Off-Grid Internet Setup.

What I'd buy to actually work from solar

Here's what I'd actually buy:

• Battery and solar input in one box: a 1,000Wh+ power station like the EcoFlow DELTA 2 with up to 500W solar in, or 2,000Wh+ if two of you work.
• Panels: about 300 to 400W total, which is two 200W folding panels you can aim at the sun.
• Charge controller, if you're doing it yourself: a real MPPT controller, never PWM.
• A backup for heat and clouds: a generator or shore access. Solar plus battery is your quiet default, not your only plan.

Size the day, not the panel. Budget your watt-hours, put 300 to 400W of solar against a battery of 1,000Wh or more, and keep a fast way to refill on the cloudy days. Do that and running the office on solar stops being a slogan and becomes a Tuesday.

My setup: the gear in this article

• Power station with solar input: EcoFlow DELTA 2 (1,024Wh, up to 500W solar)
• Portable panels: 200W folding solar panels
• Charge controller: MPPT charge controller