Future thought on RVs

[mobilrvn]

A few days ago there was an interesting article in one of the newspapers--USA Today, I think. The basic story was about a fellow who had installed solar panels over his entire roof and I think he had a wind genny, too. He produced more power than he needed. So far not an unusual story, especially to RVers. Here is the twist. He used the excess power to break down water and stored the hydrogen for use in his vehicles. Of course, when you burn hydrogen, you get water again!

With the flexible solar panels now available, wonder if we roofed our RVs with the panels, could we have enough power to produce hydrogen, too. He had about a half dozen very large storage tanks, nothing we could carry. Don't know if he compressed the hydrogen or not. If we didn't use the hydrogen in vehicles, perhaps we could use it in an onboard generator on cloudy days? Sure would be nice to be energy independent and never have to plug into shore power.

[trukdoc]

Very interesting thought.

[ggranch]

Yes, very interesting. I believe the available technology is still too bulky and heavy (the storage & conversion part) for RV usage. The hydrogen would have to be compressed in order to use it as fuel. Flexible solar panels could be used on a smaller scale to charge the house batteries and run some of the 12 volt circuits during the daytime though. Also, thanks for the input on my query about RV Toy Outlet.

Bob

[Charlie]

Unless you know what you are doing hydrogen is very dangerous. It is extremely flammable gas with a flash point of -423F and a concentration of only 4% by volume. It does not require an ignition source, it can flash with only friction contact of air. I doubt this person had the necessary equipment to compress and store liquid hydrogen.