3 thoughts on “”

  2. Depends entirely on the intended use of the battery. 15w is great for maintaining a battery at full charge, but it wouldn’t go very far to recharge a battery that had an appreciable load placed on it for, say, half a day.

    LED lighting is a pretty low load. Let’s say you had 5w worth of them hooked up and ran them for four hours. Let’s also assume that the solar panel is actually seeing full sun. Since the solar panel produces 3x the energy than the lights use (in this example), it would be able to replace the energy that was used in an hour and 20 minutes. If you ran the lights for eight hours, it would take two hours and 40 minutes of full sun to recharge the battery. So, LED lighting wouldn’t be too bad.

    Now let’s say you had a small 120v inverter hooked up to the battery and were running two 13w flourescent bulbs off it. Cheap inverters are pretty inefficient, so the load on the battery would actually be about 35w. For each hour the flourescent lights were on, you’d need two hours and 20 minutes of full sun on the solar panel to recharge the battery.

    In most cases, you’ll only see full sun for about four hours a day. More, if you take the time to re-aim the panel at the sun several times a day. If it’s overcast, drop that 15w to 7 or less, which would drastically increase the time needed to recharge the battery.

    That charge controller is a good deal, but I’d get a bigger PV panel.

  3. The easiest way to determine if your getting a “deal” on a solar panel is to figure how much each watt of power costs this one will cost you about 6.87 per watt. Your usually going to spend between 4.50 an 5 dollars average.

    If your just looking for a battery maintainer for cold weather then I’d say sure go for it. If your looking for anything more get a bigger panel.

    The best prices I’ve found on solar panels are here

    http://www.cheapestsolar.com/

    they don’t give you any tech info but damn there prices are good.

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