I’m only half kidding. I’m a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.
Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn’t much but it’s a start.
All i need is a gun to kill the local prepper and I’m set.
A looter - finally!
- That local prepper, probably
Be sure to check your local raid boss’s tier now before the content releases. A lot of them you’ll be able to solo with the right load out, but if you’re unlucky you’ll need to start putting together your party roster now because they aren’t all made to be soloed.
Nuclear war is followed by nuclear winter, which, among other things is caused by thick clouds, sorry!
We’re not going to nuke each other. Everyone is gonna die of dysentery from Texas’ lettuce-borne ass plague.
You can buy a 100ah battery and 200w solar blanket for fairly cheap. its not a terrible idea to be a little bit prepped. Saw a car on youtube the other day that was 8k, had 10kwh battery, range of 150k and had a retractable roof solar panel that gives the car 55km a day of solar generation. perfect for the apocalype. cruise around the wastelands in style.
Wow, got a link?
had 10kwh battery, range of 150k
That doesn’t really math out, its like 3 times the efficiency that car manufacturers normally give, and they already assume optimal conditions.
That sounds more like a beach buggy with a battery bolted to the back and a top speed of 40 on an even road.
It is the Solarky SunV, it has an aluminum frame and plastic panels. It probably wouldn’t pass safety inspections in EU/US and is really designed as a step up from motor bikes in places like Thailand and where I live in Mexico. I think the safety regulations and requirements for people in sprawl cities like the US are overkill for most of the rest of the world. I’ve had people on lemmy tell me that 200 km range isn’t enough but that is around how much I drive in a week lol. I never need it to go highway speeds, there are no highways thru my city only connecting to the next and for that I’d prefer the bus. For puttering around to my friends house or to grab something from the store I can’t walk to it would be perfect. I have a BYD Dolphin now.
It can pass EU safety if apply for a L6/L7 vehicle category
But from the website it looks like vaporware…
I don’t really know anything about the EU other than they have a lot of regulations. I’ll probably never go there.
These cars exist and have been sold in Thailand and Indonesia for the past few months, there are tons of videos about them on Youtube. Most people on Lemmy live in places where Chinese EVs are illegal and have no idea what we have available now. These are just typical cheap EVs with a retractable panel on top.
car
perfect for the apocalype
battery
Yeah. Right.
im always wanted to setup solar panel in mountain to reduce hiker gone missing type stuff
You thinking about setting up a public charging spot in the wilderness? I like that.
I’m gonna give this warning: I have a panel of that type but much larger. It’s rated at ~200 watts. I’ve never seen it make more than 80. I don’t think it’s a great idea to make large, flexible solar panels, I bet something internal is cracked in it. It’s…virtually impossible to handle gently. It has kick stands on 3 of its 4 panels and you CANNOT stop that one inner panel from twisting. So…I am going to avoid that style of panel if it’s larger than, say, a book. OP’s 30 watt panel is probably fine but if you’re dealing in the hundreds of watts honestly my glass panels are easier to deal with.
I don’t think this is able to reach the full 30 watts either. Probably closer to 20 under ideal conditions.
The panels themselves aren’t flexible - just the “hinges” between them. I don’t think the portability makes much sense with larger panels than this. Better just go with a proper setup at that point.
Yeah I have 100 watt panels that make 70 or 80 most of the time; those ratings are for “ideal conditions” which I take to mean “perfectly aligned, in space.”
As to the rigidity: It is a little flexible, compared to glass and aluminum. I bet it’s perfectly serviceable at smaller sizes, but when it’s 7 feet (2.13 Celsius) long:
the damn thing sags under its own weight. They shouldn’t be made this big. Those glass panels together have the same rating and they actually work worth a damn.
maybe consider upgrading to a full size wind turbine for the breezy autumn
Be careful. Those things are addicting.
That’s how I started: a little 5v, 6 watt panel I stuck in the window to charge my phone while I worked. Then I wanted to charge some other stuff, so I got a 15W panel. 15w panel was nice, but 100 watts was much better, so I bought two 100W fold-up panels like you’ve got.
Then I bought a big 1 KWh power station that could supply up to 2000 watts. I take it camping and charge it from the two 100W fold up panels.
But, sadly, the demon had its claws in me and refused to let go. “Why should I only use that solar power two or three times a year?” the voice said. So I bought 4x 200 watt panels so I could use the power station to power my homelab and refrigerator during the day.
Still, that wasn’t enough to satiate my addition. Now I’ve got 4 KW on the roof, 32 KWh of house battery, and a 10 KW inverter that is currently powering our house.
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
What about a neighborhood scale micro utility company/collective?
I recently got a bluetti for off grid onsite work and it has awoken something in me. It’s like carrying a wall outlet around with you, absolutely incredible.
Needless to say I think I have caught the bug. Where would you point a feller who wanted to walk your path and learn more?
I’m more of a hands-on learner but that can get expensive depending on the hobby haha. For going solar, I’m still very much in progress but definitely on the path to where i want to be.
Basically the first step is to decide what your goal is. Do you want to go totally off grid? Just reduce your electric bill? Have backup power? All/some of the above?
If you only want to reduce your bill, check into what’s called grid-tied or “balcony solar”. That’s the easiest to get started with, but it requires cooperation from the electric company since you’re feeding back into the grid. I can’t do that here, so I went with a standalone/battery-based system.
Once you identify your goal(s), you’ll need to figure out what your “base” load is, and then how much your peak loads are so you know what size system to shoot for. Then you’ll need to choose an inverter that can meet those with some extra capacity for unforeseen spikes. I started with a 10KW system, but it’s also expandable up to 60 KW( 6 units in parallel). My house only has 100A service, so two inverters would actually give me more power than I can currently get from the power company lol.
For the panels, you can really only expect to get 60-80% of their rated output most of the time. The rated output is under perfect alignment with the sun, at the perfect angle, and with absolutely no obstructions. In practice, you’ll never see that. As an example, I usually only get between 3 and 3.4 KW out of my 4 KW system on the best of days. This is normal.
For batteries, they’re technically optional depending on your goals. If you just want to shave some money off your electric bill, you can forego the batteries and the inverters will happily mix PV and utility to power your loads during the day. e.g. If you’re drawing 1,000 watts and only getting 900 watts from PV, then it’ll make up the missing 100 watts from utility power.
I sized my batteries based on my average daily usage plus an extra 10 KWh. We use about 20 KWh per day, so I got two 16 KWh batteries for a total of 32 KWh. That means, if there’s no (usable) sunshine at all and we lose power, I can run the whole house for a little over a full day. Any sun hitting the panels will reduce the current draw from the batteries while also charging them if we use less than the PV is producing.
The longest power outage we had was about 29 hours, but if we typically experienced multi-day outages, I might have gone for a larger battery.
I had a much longer reply written up, but it barely scratched the surface. So hope this helps in a general sense but happy to answer any specific questions if I can.
Thank you for the primer! I find it very interesting and you’ve certainly given me plenty of things to research and learn more about.
I think my biggest goal is actually power stability but the cheaper power bill would be a welcome bonus. In my new shop the table saw seems to trip it’s little built in circuit breaker a lot more often when it is cutting thick hardwood than it did in my old shop. Unless the blade is sharp as shit resawing on the table saw is a distant memory lol.
I think it’s because the run from the road to the house main is a long run and then from the house main 60 amps is routed out to the shop which is another long run out to the shops breaker box. Then from there I use a 25 ft 12 awg extension cord to power the saw and dust collector via an automatic vacuum switch. The saw very rarely tripped at the old house when the total run from the road to the saw was less than 50 feet and I never did it any favors. But now that it is hundreds of feet away from the source I think the voltage drops off and it over heats and trips the sawstops little breaker.
I hope that made sense, I’m a carpenter not an electrician lol. What I think I need is a battery set up for the shop that acts like a giant Uninterruptible Power Supply to combat the “dirty” power and put the saw closer to the source. The ability to power a hybrid solar/dehumidifier kiln in the future from the shop without sacrificing power reliability would also be something I would want to consider.
Thank you again for the write up on your setup!
Have you calculated how long it takes/took to pay for itself?
All of the labor has been DIY, and I’ve got about $9,000 invested in the system components.
Back of the napkin math, at current electric rates, puts my ROI at just under 9 years. If electric rates keep going up, it’ll pay back even faster.
Edit: Depending on how you look at it, ROI could be in as few as 1.5 to 2 years. This system is in lieu of a whole house generator that would have cost us about $7,000. Had we gone with that instead, it would never have paid for itself (other than peace of mind) and we would have been perfectly content. So if I’m only considering the price difference between this and the generator, it’d only have to pay back $2,000.
Yeah, buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag. Decentralization of the grid is a good thing regardless of if you “pay it off” or not.
buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag
$10,000? $100,000? 75% of your salary for the rest of your life?
It obviously does have a price tag at some point. If someone wanted true self-sufficiency they’d have to get a full solar setup plus a generator in case the grid went down at a time when solar power wasn’t covering the needs. (That’s likely if, for example, your power is knocked out due to wildfires, and the wildfire smoke is making the solar setup unable to produce power.)
And, you can’t really consider yourself fully self-sufficient when it comes to electrical power unless you have a n+1 setup, so you have a backup generator in case the primary one fails and needs to be repaired.
If you enjoy it, it already has.
Okay but for real how long
Time, in hours (H), equals average solar kilowatt hours per month (K), multiplied by the price of one kilowatt hour (P), divided by the total cost © of all the purchased components.
H = (K * P) / C
I’m sure if you were patient and dedicated enough, you could approximate each of those numbers using the info OP has already posted and get a general idea (weeks, months, or years).
Time, in hours (H), equals average solar kilowatt hours per month (K), multiplied by the price of one kilowatt hour (P), divided by the total cost © of all the purchased components.
H = (K * P) / C
So you’re dividing the average saving per month by the total cost and expecting to get hours?
If we generously estimate a very high 3000kWh/month generated and high $0.40/kWh price and it cost OP $9000, then you formula is (3000×0.40)/9000 = 0.133 hours.
Breaking even after less than 1 hour?!??! Extraordinary!
It’s pretty easy to cry about bad math, but it’s a lot harder to figure out the right math.
Don’t worry, I’ll try to do it for you again a second time.
Power consumption varies. Use the average monthly power draw from the solar array, let’s assume for demonstration purposes 1,000 kWh/month.
Multiply that by the cost of 1 kWh from the power company, let’s say 20 cents.
In one month, that means you saved $200.
Let’s assume the solar equipment costs $1,000.
The answer is 5 months, or 5,000 kWh.
Sorry, I’ll make sure the free work I do for you is better quality next time.
A hobby pays itself just by enjoying it. I’ve never calculated how long it will take to pay off my gaming rig
That’s the dream though
That’s a weird panel to battery ratio. Guess you’ve gotta work on that now. Got more room on your roof, preferably south-facing?
Though if there are ground systems that can aim the panels and you have room there, that could be really cool.
The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I’ll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.
The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.
I’ve only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They’ve been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.
I’ve been looking to get a so-called “Chinese diesel heater” to my shed to keep it warm over the coldest days in winter when electricity is very expensive and the two small radiators designed to only keep it above freezing can no longer keep up. However, those run off 12V DC and power supplies seem to be surprisingly hard to come by. Easiest solution would be a car battery and a trickle charger but I’ve thought about just setting up a tiny solar system instead because then I would have a kind of off-grid location to fall back to. My house doesn’t have a fireplace either but the shed does (sauna). This would also allow me to charge all my tool batteries that require a standard outlet.
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
I haven’t heard you say a word about your solar powered electric car…
Check back in 2-3 years when I (hope to) get an EV. I’m sure I’ll be crowing about it then 😆
In the mean time, would you like to hear about my solar powered lawn mower?
Unironically yes haha. I hope it’s just a manual lawn mower that you have your son push around.
Lol, no. And if you were expecting something clever like a goat, sorry to disappoint lol. Just a basic battery-electric push mower that I’ve charged from solar panels all season.
Could setup a solar powered desalination plant to water your garden too
Jokes on you when they nuke the sky
That’s why I skipped solar panels and went straight to human bioenergy pods
LOL “…but we know it was us who blacked the sky.”
—Morpheus (And not the Timothée Chalamet version)
also not the Highlander 2: The Quickening version where they blacked out the sky to stop global warming
At least that was just a shield you could disable by throwing an immortal alien through.
Nice! I’m gonna have to go back and watch that… either I’ve never seen that version or I’d completely forgotten about that detail.
And I even watched the TV show ;-)
It’s probably the worst of the Highlanders. There was an updated version called The Renegade Cut that might be better.
I had no clue they had made so many. Thanks for the bonus tip… was it just bad-bad or cheesy bad? Because I feel like a large part of the appeal for me is the vague cheesiness of the whole series.
Edit: Got a Standard directors cut, and the renegade version… But in the process, I rediscovered that I recently downloaded Hot to Trot because it was on somebody’s list of worst movies ever. So I’m gonna have to watch that first 😝
Highlander 2 just makes no sense in general. They bring in some crazy shit about the immortals being aliens from the planet “Zeist” and ridiculous stuff like MacCloud riding a flying hoverboard happens.
It’s still worth watching at least once though
Oh man… it’s coming back to me now. Was there some kind of weird council of space-elders or something like that? I kinda vaguely remember a scene where MacCloud testifying and lights going on like campfire ghost stories when each person talks?
IDK, I might be mixing in some Dr. Who 🤓
I think if it gets down to it, you’re not going to worry too much about your shiny toys when you haven’t eaten in three days.
30w is plenty to run a few small lights and phone chargers. You can cook over a wood fire if necessary, or store food that doesn’t need cooking.
Kinda curious now what the back to reasonable normality for essential needs time is for most disasters. Don’t need to stockpile enough to last until completely rebuilt, if food supplies are going to be restored fairly quickly but housing takes a year you don’t need the full years food supply.
Why wouldn’t I have eaten in three days?
How do you define apocalypse? You’re just larping, friend.
You’re just larping, friend.
Please elaborate. I have nothing against larping but that doesn’t seem to carry utility beyond the enjoyment gained from the act itself. A small solar panel, however, seems useful for any scenario ranging from a few day power outage to full societal collapse and zombies. It’s a genuine functional panel - not a prop.
How will a solar panel help against full societal collapse? I am on tenterhooks.
I can charge my flashlights/lanterns, powerbanks, tool batteries, a phone with offline maps and offline wikipedia …
OK buddy, good luck.
What’s with that passive-aggressive smugness? If you’ve got something to say then say it.
Taco truck dude got eaten by clowns
This can power a Steam Deck. Good choice.
Can it charge up enough batteries to run a typical Factorio session? So until sunrise where you can start charging the accumulators again.
If you weren’t using your Steam Deck all-out during the day then probably. Steam Decks draw about 29W max (the LCD models I have at least).
Factorio GPU demands are fairly low, CPU will be maxed out by late game though…
In the event of an apocalypse basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights.
devices with offline knowledge. you can download wikipedia to your device.
also gaming consoles against the boredom and to maybe connect to the neighbor for fun?
Laughing with mp3-player.
And meshtastic or meshcore to communicate
Intriguing. Go on…
There are small devices for off-grid text communication based on radio frequencies. It’s uses LoRa and it requires no Internet after setting up(you may need to download the app). Be aware that Line of sight is a bit factor and that buildings, tress and other stuff might affect it.
You can buy a device or build one on your own (you need to buy first chip and battery) and install/flash mesh on it.
Be careful though, do not get hyped from what you read or see, because in the end might not suit you. Here in Europe it has grown up a lot, lots of people use it, especially when traveling in another country l.I just gave you a basic explanation, for more information visit the meshtastic community
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtasticMeshtastic and meshcore websites https://meshtastic.org// https://meshcore.io/
Wow, okay, so this is way better and longer-range than Bluetooth. Cool. Thanks for sharing!
Hmm. So let’s talk resilience; lighting, battery power tools, refrigeration, Mobility (mountain eBikes, with solar recharging would make for great post apocalyptic transportation), and many more things.
Look: I plan solar panels, batteries, and a small TV set, so during the apocalypse, I will have my Netflix shows! And with the right EV, I will be one of the few who can still go to Costco!
You see: I’m ready!!
You underestimate the amount of digital hoarders out there.
Or maybe hoarders overestimate how much and how long they can rely on their digital stuff.
Once you let go of heating and cooling, larger temperature variations are going to do a number on you consumer grade electrical devices. Your solar panels are one heavy hails storm away from destruction, and if we assume climate change is the cause of the apocalypse, you can count on those.
The best way to survive an apocalypse is to rebuild communities with a wide set of skills, and still dramatically lower our quality-of-life AND HEALTH expectations.
You know, you can charge your house? With a large enough battery and enoug PV power you can operate a heat pump off the grid to control the climate of your home.
The feasibility varies a bit, depending on where exactly you live, but there are definitely useful things you can do with solar power and batteries.
Nothing that a 30W panel can manage though. And I definitely agree to your point about rebuilding communities.
Electric fire starter. Mesh nodes. Walkie talkies. Small computer with offline Wikipedia and Google maps. GPS may still be working for a while, so that would be useful to charge and use. Portable fans. MP3 player or other entertainment device. Camera. Small power tool batteries…
Yeah, in an apocalypse, a small about of electricity would be a luxury.
Ehh, disagree. We have a battery backup system (they charge from the electric lines) for our house because we have a well instead of septic lines, so when the power goes out we don’t have water. Our next big purchase will be panels to charge the batteries as further backup.
Interesting. Where do you live?
Around here (Germany), most people get solar power first and THEN buy a battery, when they realize it’s financially more feasible to use as much of the energy the generated themselves instead of using grid power.
In the event of an apocalypse basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights.
My house is quite rural and I have a water well with a battery backup for the pump and UV filter. The battery lasts for about 5-6 days depending on use. I can charge the battery from the grid or with solar.
If the cities get nuked, my well system will still function.
Can you repair it if it breaks?
I get water from 800ft underground. Not a long term solution but being able to drink, cook, and bathe for a few weeks or months is going to be important. It is useful to be able to power the pump with batteries charged by the sun until enough people have died so I can migrate to a more tolerant climate without having to mad max it.
gasmask, radiation tablets and suits, a working moter bike and a ton of gas are higher on my list.
How long does gasoline keep?
2 or so year, but that long enough to get you to where you need to, if it take over 2 years of driving to get what you need and you can’t find any more, sorry but you were probubly fucked from the get go
That is where a diesel bike and maybe a diesel truck as well would come in handy. You can continue making biodiesel long term, and use the engine for generator power in a pinch. You can even go with mechanically controlled engines and not have problems with EMP to be extra prepared.
There are power tools that run on batteries these days. I don’t know about you, but a chainsaw seems pretty useful to me.
At 30watts max I guess you can cut a log or two every once and a while sure.
Depends on tge apocolypse, but Refrigeration… HVAC… Power tools… Could go on.
Maybe even your phone if you’ve downloaded books/manuals/maps needed to rebuild before hand
What is 30 watts going to do for any of those? I don’t think people here know how weak a 30 W panel is.
The argument was that: “basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights” not that 30 watts is sufficient for long term.
The one statement I replied to gave examples like refrigeration and HVAC that a 30w panel will not run. I made no commentary on what use can be made outside of flashlights.
That being said, as someone who runs 100w panels on my trailer parked on some land, 100w is not much other then topping off a deep cycle battery to then run lights and a propane furnace and fridge. Not that it is not useful at anything, just that those rollup ones are generally used to charge a power bank for phones, lights, and such. One of the better uses I have seen is hooking up one to a car to keep it topped up while sitting. But if you are going to use a panel you need a battery and at that point why not go with a non flexable 100w panel that is about the same size or smaller?
are generally used to charge a power bank for phones, lights, and such.
That’s exactly the use case I bought it for. In the picture I’m charging a powerbank. I’m intending to play around with a small-scale solar setup on my shed at some point but for now this is the one cheap investment that enables me to keep critical small electronics running indefinitely.
Check out some auctions, estate sales and such for some deep cycle batteries, solar charge controllers and panels. I have fixed my set up a few times over the years on the super cheap that way. The whole system is not bad other then the batteries for cost.
My strimmer battery charger takes 65w. So 8 hours of 30w to charge a battery is almost 4 hours charging the strimmer battery which would probably fill it’s small battery a few times over. If you are not depleting the strimmer battery multiple times a day, that is more than enough power.
You of course do need a battery to store it so many hours of solar are used in several minute short time loads.
A 30W solar panel is likely going to charge at about 5W, given the inefficiency.
There is some inefficiency in charging a battery but not that much. Main losses would be that the solar panel isn’t actually outputting 30w as you won’t be getting ideal conditions all day.
But it doesn’t necessarily matter either. 65w to charge a battery but you only need it once a week for an hour can easily be managed by 5w all day for a week.
Though planning for an apocalypse is kinda pointless anyway. Preparing for a disaster is more reasonable, such as a storm knocking out power for a while.
I was getting around 12 watts during the sunset when I was testing it. It can probably reach around 20 watts under ideal conditions.
do you have somewhere to be? if the power goes down long enough, it’s not like you’re going to be in a hurry. but yes 30w is pretty small. you can buy a 450w solar panel for under 200 bucks. add a inverter and 100ah battery and you’re laughing. most shit you can run on dc like lighting and small devices.
30w can charge a battery bank like a Jackery, and those can put out 1000w continously. It would take ages to charge, but it’s more than nothing.
It might be better than nothing for some things, but providing enough power to run heaters as needed when it’s -20F outside over the next week ain’t going to happen. And while it would work for an LP furnace for a while, that tank WILL go empty, and then where do you get more fuel?
Burning wood seems like the obvious solution to keeping warm in the winter. There’s much better uses for the little solar power there is available then.
Burning wood comes with its own extra work and costs. Plus the danger of burning your house down. I live in a forest, and wood heat is not uncommon here. There were 4 wood heat fires that destroyed homes this past winter, it was a cold and long winter this year. And I did grow up with wood heat as a kid, so I’m very familiar with it. I do remember a couple of chimney fires quite well.
Person I was responding to said nothing that can be charged, not specifically charged by 30 W. People live comfortably off grid these days with panels and batteries to store. Nothing perfect, but the right setup could matter if things went bad
We’re not talking about a whole off grid home here lol. We’re talking about a guy with a 30W solar panel.
You’re moving the goalposts. You said nothing rechargeable besides flashlights isn’t going to be of any use in the apocalypse which is an obviously false statement as demonstrated by the pushback you’re getting. The size of the solar system wasn’t part of the argument you made.
You just get to learn to be VERY patient.
That’s a pretty ignorant thing to say.
Nah, those electric shoe polishers? All eight of them? Why did you get so many of them?
Those I can live without. I can just have people polish my shoes by hand for exchange to letting them charge their devices using my solar panel.
Yeah, light in the dark is totally useless.
I feel like you must have stopped reading my comment half way through to say that……
It wasn’t worth finishing.
Also be careful storing powerbanks at full charge, charge them at 80% or ideally around half for maximum longevity
Also don’t charge devices directly from solar power because voltage changes drastically due to sun movement and clouds. Better load a power bank and use that to charge the other devices as power banks are much more resilient to changing voltages.
don’t charge devices directly from solar power
Unless your power bank has a built in charge controller, this should also include your power bank. At its core, a power bank is nothing more than a big ass lithium ion (or maybe potassium ion, if it’s newer) battery, just like the one in any other device.
potassium ion, if it’s newer
i think you mean sodium ion?
Potassium ion?
You’re saying I can ditch the lemons and power my potato with bananas?
Indeed. They’re all the rage in China right now (I AM NOT A TANKIE). Some are predicting they’re the “next generation” of battery technology.
Errr I am pretty sure those are currently only in use in prototyping and research, did you mean a different battery technology?
Yeah, I think I meant Sodium-ion
It also saves a lot of money to do this. I’ve found it takes almost as much power to go from 80 to 100 as it does to go from 0 to 80.
It doesn’t. It takes longer to charge to 100, but the efficiency is basically the same. The amp draw drops after 80%. If you are using a engine to charge, you would lose efficiency because of the extra time, but using solar wouldn’t have this issue.
I’ve got one of these for camping. It’s great for keeping my phone charged when there is no power available.
Yay! I hope it comes in handy.
I don’t have solar yet, but I have a small portable power station that lets us avoid the manually started gas generator 90% of the time we have an outage. It’s important people prepare for smaller, more common events too.
I’ve been scheming to install panels on my garage roof for a year or so. My biggest hurtle is needing to make space for an inverter next to the circuit panel, but first my hot water tank is installed too close to the panel so it can’t pass an inspection until I move it. Which means a ton of new plumbing before u even get to the new stuff. Ugggh
