Greetings!
A cheapie generator and a regular battery charger are much cheaper and much more efficient than solar panels.
Solar panels have too many negatives, they’re expensive, they don’t charge the batteries correctly and kill them quickly, they don’t work well in the winter when you really need the power, they don’t work at night, and parking in the sun during the summer is cruel and unusual punishment.
I’m pretty frugal with my power usage, no power hog 12v fridge, no powered roof vents, no powered furnace, etc. I charge up all my rechargeables while driving, and only recharge them while parked if necessary. I don’t use an inverter for anything. My house battery will last up to a week, and so will my starting battery.
My starting battery is also a deep cycle battery, and I have low voltage cut offs on both my house battery and my starting battery. This makes sure you never drain your battery too deeply, and in the case of my starting battery, still leaves me plenty of power to start my van.
Don’t get me wrong, I have more than enough power for anything I need, I just don’t waste power on foolishness. I still run many things on my batteries.
Even with solar, no system is complete without charging while driving, and a generator. Deleting the solar added years to my batteries life span, and I still mainly charge while driving and only use my generator if I’m boondocking for over two weeks, or need shore power to run power tools or something. I actually use my generator more to charge other people’s batteries than I do my own. People relying only on solar always have dead batteries.
I also have been buying my deep cycle batteries from junk yards now. You can get practically new ones dirt cheap, and sometimes they have a rather impressive collection to choose from because people with cars usually don’t use deep cycle batteries. They have dates on them, so you can tell how old they are. I got two, 3 week old, $300+ batteries for under $20 each! That was over 6 years ago, and they’re still going strong. How’s that for bang for your buck!?!?!
Cheers!