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Solar Charging / Battery Pack

Reviews I've read on a couple solar/battery packs seem to indicate they don't work very well and are kind of a gimmick.

I'd just stick with a giant battery pack or two if you're gonna be out in the boonies for a while.
 
Well my mother is going on a trip a little later this year (March) for about 2 weeks for girl guide of canada to their annual camp that they have and would be charging a kindle, a samsung tab 3 i think it is would have to look, and possibly an iphone 4

She wont have access to power every day and she would like something to be able to charge the devices
 
Dahak said:
Well my mother is going on a trip a little later this year (March) for about 2 weeks for girl guide of canada to their annual camp that they have and would be charging a kindle, a samsung tab 3 i think it is would have to look, and possibly an iphone 4

She wont have access to power every day and she would like something to be able to charge the devices
Click to expand...

There were some reviews on amazon for a 22 watt panel, it gave out 2 watts of power in the sun, that's around 0.4amps. At that rate it would probably take 4-5 hours to charge the iphone 4.
So the 4 watt panel you linked to would probably charge the phone in 22 hours in the sun, so most likely 3 days. These small panels are useless, you need a huge one at best.
 
Just for comparison sake, these two panels are 30 watts each:



When testing in full sun light in July I got maybe 15 watts out of one of those panels. (I only added the second one after and never really ran tests again)
 
Most of the panels sold on Amazon are battery-based chargers that have a small solar panel attached. These are essentially gimmicks and they do not produce enough power to charge a phone in a reasonable time period. A lot of the specifications lie about the actual power-output and they get away with this by including a battery which does the actual phone charging.

That said, you can get solar panels which are capable of charging a phone but they are big and usually expensive. Or you you can get a battery backup to charge a phone.

If you really want to go solar, then look for the ones that do not have an internal battery, that mention the efficiency of the panel (should > 15%) and the material used in the panel (you want "monocrystalline"), and one that specifically mentions the output current and that has reviews that independently back-up the claimed output. And then get something that is at least 20W. You might read the reviews and think "I can get away with 8W" but really in this, you want to overengineer the thing. I would state that the bare minimum should be a 15W, and you really want something >20W.

All Powers have a nice set up that works well. About the only negatives seem to be that it can't easily stand up to the rigors of camping and the wires can break if you put it through a backpacking trip. But the output of the panels seems to be close to what they claim and you can charge a phone with one in a reasonable couple of hours. Something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B015IGXXSQ
 
It depends on what you whan to charge and what is your budget. My advice: get the one that costs the most and better adapts to your requirements.
 
I haven't used this personally, but Anker makes really good charging equipment, and their 21W PowerPort Solar is rated to put out 2.4 watts on a single USB port, or 3 watts total output when using both USB ports at the same time, which should be more than enough to charge a single device as quickly as it can take the power, or two devices at a slightly slower rate but still much faster than a standard PC USB port.
 
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