Solar Panels

[BikingViking]

Has anyone out there had good luck with solar panels to recharge cell phones and digital cameras? I tried one without success. Good information is hard to get.

[valygrl]

No, I had some bad luck with one.  Had a brunton solar panel (cheap-o one from REI) that failed to charge the MP3 batteries even with a whole July day of sunlight.  Better to just keep your chargers handy, and plug in at a restaurant, library, or laundromat.  

[BikingViking]

Yeah, that has been my experience as well. I have two I-Sun daisy chained together and will not charge the battery pack or my cell phone. Money wasted in my opinion.

[FredHiltz]

The trouble with solar charging is that our rechargeable batteries do not take well to trickle charging. They need the high pulsed current supplied by good chargers to get a full charge.

http://www.batteryuniversity.com is an excellent place to learn more than you ever wanted to know about all this, written by a man who makes his living charging and testing batteries.

I carry a small Maha charger and 6 AA cells, all weighing less than a solar charger, for my GPS. I need to find an outlet only every 4 or 5 days.

Fred

[2010]

My son uses this cool looking tri-winged thing-a-mabob to charge his ipod, available from Apple. Also works on phones & other toys.

[tofubicycle]

I highly recommend the Silva Solar II for 12v items like cell phones, gps and ipods and the Solar I for recharging AA batteries. Both are a little hard to find in the US but IMHO worth the internet searching. The 12v model is usualy priced around $90us and the AA model $50us.

I've used the AA version on long back packing and short cycling trips and love it. I have not used the 12v model but assume that it's just as effective. Jakub Postrzygacz used these on his Canning Stock Route trek.

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i'd rather be biking.