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Subject Topic: Solar - worth it in the UK for camping? Post Reply Post New Topic
PersonSky1970
16/4/2023 at 3:17pm
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600 watt battery packs and solar? Appreciate not enough juice for heaters, kettles, cookers and hair dryers and similar, but was thinking about the baby Bluetti (600 watt) battery if it will work on my tent pump (I already a have the AC converter) - so I can inflate it on my own when my car is not next to me and no electric. Also perhaps for heating blanket and. Electric hot water bottle (400 watt for 10 minutes also £300 watt hair styler. Assume it will need recahargvng pretty quickly - so does solar work well enough in this sun starved co to recharge.   

Basically interested in whether anyone had a batter pack and or solar panel to use for camping - what they use them for and how good they are (particular the solar re-charge bit).


PersonBramston
16/4/2023 at 4:15pm
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If you are camping without a car a 20w folding solar panel will keep a 6 cell 18650 lithium ion battery bank charged and enable you to charge your Sat Nat while riding a bike and also your phone, cycle lights (torch), Kindle and tablet. They claim that it can charge a laptop but you'd be limited to a couple of hours a day. With Solid State Drives and energy economy screens a more modern laptop might last longer.
If your laptop warms up during use it consumes a lot of power, anything that warms up or has moving parts uses lots of power. Kettles, cookers and heaters warm up while fridges have pumps and fans running all the time.
To power these items you are moving from 10s of watts to 100s of watts or even kilowatts.
If you have a caravan you can permanently cover the roof in 100W solar panels, if you are car camping you'll be limited to one or two 100w panels.
There is a company making a solar panel kit including a small fridge but you'll be limited to a couple of pints of milk and your pharmaceuticals.
They promise major advances in solar panel technology coming soon, until then use solar for camp lighting and recharging personal portable devices.
If you want hot/warm washing water consider a solar shower bag, these black water filled bags heat up in the sun and provide hot/warm water more efficiently than using solar electricity to heat cold water.

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Enjoy the liveliness of the syntax.


Personoldham
16/4/2023 at 5:39pm
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Yes I use Solar, and agree with Bramston good for LED lights and recharging low use items phones sat navs water pump. Never had a problem.

Would never use it for high usage or anything that heats up. Yes it will charge a laptop good enough for short term use ( downloading pictures from the camera keeping in touch. But would not be using it to play games watch films.

Never ended up sitting in the dark so for me It works. 25 w solar panel for tent 80w panel for caravan.

I never rated solar bags so for me so gas for caravan water heater or kettle for tent which supplies hot water for shower hot water bottles and yes washing up

Hair stylers Not an issue give them a beanie hat. (perhaps not or you may need the address of A & E )

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Yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision, but today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.









Persontrog100
16/4/2023 at 7:18pm
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dokio make a nice 200 watt fold up panel for about £175 quid.. when the sun is out it will produce a real 100 watts maybe bit more if angled perfectly..

i have 300 watts on my caravan roof plus a dokio 200 watt panel if i need a bit more.. 500 watts in total these feed into a couple of 100 ah lithium batteries..

i did just buy a 2000wh power station now on "sale" for about £1100 quid its bit heavy though at 22 kilos or around 50 pounds.. one of those plus a couple of the fold up dokio panels would be more that enough for most applications..

its all do-able but it aint cheap.. so really it isnt about what can be done its more about how much a person wants to spend..

rather than spend money on a newer caravan i spend money on my old one.. :)

trog


PersonGazza90
20/4/2023 at 9:54am
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I know with quite a few of the portable power stations you can plug it in and solar charge at the same time which makes it super useful if you're using appliances that use a heavy amount of power like the hair styler you mentioned.

EcoFlows can recharge to full in just over an hour I think and 2-3 hrs with the solar panel which is pretty insane.

Like trog said it'll cost a pretty penny so you got to weight up how much you will use it in my opinion.


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Persontrog100
20/4/2023 at 3:01pm
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the power station i just bought takes 1100 watts from the wall and 500 watts from solar.. you can run both together giving 1600 watts..

you would need a fair few panels to get 500 watts though.. it will mains charge to 80% in around 1.5 hours.. the charge rate slows down for the last bit.. its the same on all power stations..

copy and paste the link into your browser..

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144979639722

trog



Post last edited on 20/04/2023 15:05:18


PersonGazza90
26/4/2023 at 12:21pm
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Quote: Originally posted by Sky1970 on 16/4/2023
600 watt battery packs and solar? Appreciate not enough juice for heaters, kettles, cookers and hair dryers and similar, but was thinking about the baby Bluetti (600 watt) battery if it will work on my tent pump (I already a have the AC converter) - so I can inflate it on my own when my car is not next to me and no electric. Also perhaps for heating blanket and. Electric hot water bottle (400 watt for 10 minutes also £300 watt hair styler. Assume it will need recahargvng pretty quickly - so does solar work well enough in this sun starved co to recharge.   

Basically interested in whether anyone had a batter pack and or solar panel to use for camping - what they use them for and how good they are (particular the solar re-charge bit).


I was speaking to someone at a store to get some information on what solar panels would be enough to charge. And I got this answer:

For a 110ah AGM battery they can only use half of the capacity of the battery, an 110ah battery only has technically 55ah. A 90W Solar Kit can generate 63 amp hours per day in a UK summer, this kit should be sufficient to keep the battery topped up every day for a long weekend.

“a good summers day” is usually between April to the end of October. If you are looking at cover over the winter months you would need to find a hook-up more often as the solar panels would create 7x less power than in the summer.


PersonBramston
26/4/2023 at 3:14pm
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Whatever your system you would aim to have your battery fully charged before leaving home, each 24 hour day of camping you will use a proportion of this charge. If you use less than 1/4 charge per day you don't need solar panels for a weekend camp.
With solar panels each daytime's sunshine will partially charge or top up your battery. If at dawn each day you have less charge left in your battery than the day before you will at some point run and out of power. You now have the Apollo 13 problem of saving enough power to get you back to Earth but of being alive when you return.
At this point you need to consider adding more solar panels or using less power.
If at dawn each day your battery is fully discharged while at dusk it is fully charged you need more or bigger batteries or to use less power.
The alternative to more solar panels is a wind turbine which would provide power during bad weather and at night.


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Enjoy the liveliness of the syntax.



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