A few years ago I build a DIY power station with a deep cycle lead acid battery that charged off my CRV alternator via some hefty 0 gauge cables and a battery isolated, paired with a 1000w inverter and a number of 12V DC power ports to use for a camping road trip. I had converted the back of our CRV with a double bed and a small 12V fridge, and we were driving ling distances every couple days on this trip and it worked great for that application and kept the fridge running with just charging off the alternator.
Fast forward a couple years and now most of our camping trips involve driving a couple hours to a site and setting up for a few days and no real driving once we get there. This has exposed the big issues with the original setup as the fridge drains the lead acid battery down after a couple days and without starting the car and going for a decent drive I cant recharge the battery.
With that in mind im looking to upgrade and rebuild the whole system, replacing the lead acid battery with a 100ah LiFePo4 and switching to solar charging with a Victron MPPT controller. In addition we now have a new vehicle (truck) and im not Inclined to run big cables through the firewall to the alternator for charging.
The question that has now come up is im struggling to decide if I should go with 2 100W rigid panels or a more expensive and probably less efficient 200W folding portable panel..
We have a big vehicle so transporting the panels would be no issue, I do know that that folding panels appear to have a shorter lifespan. I also want to note that while we will be tenting this year and on occasion, eventually we would plan to get a small travel trailer and I would likely install the power setup in there, probably in the next 1-2 years.
With all that inmind, would you recommend buying the rigid panels and dealing with them being a bit more cumbersome for tenting for the tradeoff in better efficiency and lower cost? Or is it really a bug pain moving around rigid panels and are folding panels better than I am giving them credit for?
Open to other options if I am missing something!