2 x 80L engels would chew the power consumption. You'd need around 150-200A/H battery, and probably a 250W panel, at a guess.

the upside is that battery would power them all night anyway, as long as the solar panel could fully charge the battery by the end of the day.

I turn my engels off at night anyway when I go away. theyre pretty well insulated, and don't drop very much temp overnight, especially when theyre full.

 Yep, per above. 2x100ah batteries and 2x 120 w panels. I dare say that unless you had consecutive cloudy days, you would rarely need your generator.

 The guys are on to it Kirky , i would go 2 x 100 AH batteries and either 2 x 120 panels or 1 large panel . 1, 100AH battery powers a 60ltr engel for 3 days without any solar so you can guestimate from that. All depends on where you put your fridges and how many times you open and close them as well. Check out Baintech power boxes at any Battery World shop they are a great bit of equipment.

Cheers 

Willo

Sounds like that might be the way forward.

Cheers for the replies  

The fridge would draw a lot less than the freezer... I'd be tempted to add a massive battery in the circuit currently and 30/40amp charger and use your Honda to run it.

I would work on 3amp/hr on the fridge & 5amps/hr on the freezer totalling 8amps/hr (Cycle on/off time). 8amps x 24hrs would be 192amp. To get any reasonable life out of them, you don't really want to take your batteries below 50% SOC on a regular basis so you would need to be charging for 2-3hrs every 12hrs. Regular depletion below 50% SOC reduces a batteries life by up to 75%. You would probably use 1.5-2Ltrs max of fuel per day on a Honda EU10. 

Unless you have 500w+ of solar, I don't believe you will replace the depleted charge from the battery/batteries from when solar is operating at sub-optimum conditions (16hrs from 24) in reality. 

Whilst a 120w panel may run the fridge and provide charge into the battery of 2-3amps per hour in optimum conditions, this probably only happens for 5-6hrs per day delivering only 18amps back to depleted battery from the other 14-18hr of use.

If you go with solar, you probably still want the Gennie & Charger setup anyway to top up the batteries and save your investment.

We did 6month trip off the grid with 1x 110ltr fridge, 37ltr freezer, 300w of Solar and 330amps of Batteries and a 40amp charger. I tended to run the Generator every 2/3 days if we weren’t driving anywhere to top off the batteries.

 I run a 80 litre Waeco, and a 130 litre home made freezer using a CF 50 Danfoss and refrigerated blower unit. To run an 80l fridge and plenty of LED lighting,  175w of solar and 105a/hr deep cycle is fine, never need the gennie unless you have a lot of cloud. Add another 60 litre fridge and things get a bit fraught, you are running the battery charger for a while each night . Run that 60 litre alone from a 120w solar panel with 105a/hr battery ( and no lighting)and you hardly dent it overnight . My current setup to run the 80l fridge and 130 litre freezer is 320w of solar with two 105a/hr batteries paralleled through one controller. Plus I am running around 40 w of LED lighting--yes, you could probably see us from space   I am talking about winter up there, hours of daylight a lot shorter, but cooler. tradeoff? hard to quantify. This generally requires us to run the generator and 50A charger for around 2 hours each evening, to be sure of getting through the night without the freezer going out on low volatage. Of course, you  can let it go, just means that the freezer won't restart until the sun has been above the horizon for about 3/4 hour. while the freezer gactually has little greater current draw than the big fridge, it's the duty cycle that kills you. It's on more than twice as long as the fridge over any given period.

To summarise, if you only want to carry 200w of solar, and run it through 2 x 105a/hr batteries, you will need to run your gennie and charger each evening while you load is highest ( lighting added) Only one battery, you'll be running that generator a lot. I have a 50A smart charger, just don't bother running as small one. Bushpower does a good 50A smart charger, I've been using mine for about 7 years now no issues. Battery chargers are one thing that doesn't seem to have gotten cheaper.

We have for many years now we take a honda generator which we run from about 9 in the morning until about 4 in the arvo , this runs the fridges and freezer and chargers the 2 battery packs (which I made ) then all the lighting and fridges etc run off the batteries until the next morning

Works a treat and use around 3 litres of fuel per day !!

Kirky like the lads have said above use the genny to recharge if/when you need to but i wouldn't panic if they shut off for a few hours each night if whatever you decide to run with doesn't get you through....

Personally I use 1 panel 1 battery and a genny when needed to run a fridge and freezer.....

Never takes long to give the battery a boost with 240v charge especially when you throw the fridges on the 240 also....

No doubt there is a perfect set up out there but generally everything is a compromise, an extra panel and an extra battery means extra weight which of course means extra fuel anyway regardless of how you look at it....

I'd be personally going 1 decent panel and 1 decent battery + Gen....

Doesn't hurt to buy a back up regulator for the panel ( $30 ebay you can get a good one ), if you skimp on the unleaded and the regulator shits itself you'll be doing a long trip to town if you haven't accounted for enough ULP....

 Thanks for all the replies. The little genny does a great job, no complaints there. For the 2 weeks we probably got through around 50/60 litres of fuel, running it around 18/20 hrs a day. This is the middle of summer aswell. I was thinking more along the lines of reducing weight in the tinny but by the time I chuck in a couple of batteries and try to look after the big panels I think I may be better off sticking with what I know. 

double post

 I did a nine week trip last year and never used the genset. I run a 40L Engel as a fridge and a 40L bushman as a freezer plus a few led lights. I have 1x200 watt panel mounted on the camper and 1x165 watt portable panel. 2x100 amp batteries wired in parallel and a 20 amp solar regulator. 

Is a lot of solar power for a fridge and freezer however I never needed the genset for the nine weeks and I could have run a third fridge if I wanted. Better to have too much than not enough I reakon. 

Depends on what you want Kirky, my preference would be 100% solar and the genset for emergency. Pros and cons with all set-ups. 

The one thing, if you don't get the solar set up right, it will do ya head in ! 

 I run similar to guys above but I wouldn't mind one of these xd70 from   www.bushman.com.au it runs 240v 12v and lpg