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Are Solar Power Kits Easy To Setup?

Wow I just came back from a camping trip with a few buddies of mine, now we're all in our thirties and no one was going to camping without at least a BlackBerry or iPhone in our backpacks. Now anyone who has ever used an iPhone knows that you can only get at most two days of power if you're lucky, and since our five man crew had three iPhones among them we needed a plan. So we decided to test out a few solar power kits for the camping trip.

Well since being green is also the in thing to do we had a few friends who really wanted to play with solar power kits anyway and get our geek on. Wow one friend bought a 60 watt kit for more than $1,000 while another friend tried to be a bit more reasonable and bought a 20 watt kit for around $500 dollars. Looking at both of these kits they included the same items really, the 60 watt kit threw in a 25 watt florescent light bulb to know that the kit is working I guess for a thousand bucks they could have thrown in a better freebie. The contents of the kits were:

• Solar panel
• Charge controller
• Battery
• Inverter
• Voltage meter
• 12v DC outlet and fuse

Everything connected pretty easily, but looking at these components we thought they were a big joke, a little research with the good old Google and we could have bought everything here at the automotive store and probably even just built our own panel.

 

Here's a very basic rundown of most of these solar power kits, you point the solar panel at the sun, which produces electricity and goes down into the big car battery. Through a series of Rube Goldberg connections, the charge controller prevents the battery from overcharging from too much energy being sent in while the voltage meters tells you how much power your generating. This is all DC power so the inverter and 12v outlet turns that DC power into regular AC power with an outlet, so we can charge our iPhones and Blackberries. Here's a tip that took us a lot of research to figure out, we were wondering why we were essentially missing 5 watts per hour, turns out the inverter uses power as well while it's turning the power from DC to AC, again more research and planning could have saved us time with these solar power kits.

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In the end we had a few guys put these kits into a water cooler and we were just using these water coolers as seats while we sat by the fire so these solar power kits were put to good use. I however was not satisfied with the extreme price of these kits and found a guide that had me building a kit that rivaled my friend's kits all for under $200, I found this website here. http://www.DiyHomeMadeSolarPanels.info

Voltaic 1001 Solar Powered Backpack