Sunforce Solar Battery Charger
Sunforce Solar Battery Charger
Sunforce Solar Battery Charger information and products are listed below:
Looking to charge a 12 V battery with Solar Power – Lots of questions.?
I’m looking to run a small television no more than an hour or two a few times a week from a battery – and I plan on charging the battery with a Solar Panel.
I’m clueless – trickle chargers, battery maintainers, AC/DC converters – its all overwhelming.
How big of a battery do I need? It needs to be a Deep Cycle? How many watt/volts/amps do I need from my Solar Panel?
I’m looking at the Cabela’s Sunforce 12 Volt Solar Charger – is this big enough?
I’d appreciate your answers – The more I read up on the subject, the more I realize how much I don’t know about Solar Panels and batteries.
Step by step. Some small televisions can actually run on 12 volts from a car battery, but if it can only run off mains electricity, then you need an inverter (DC/AC converter) which takes the 12 volts DC from a battery and supplies AC at mains voltage to the TV. As for size, let us say you want to run the TV for 3 hours a day every other day. Your TV should have a rating plate giving its current consumption, but let us say 100 watts. The inverter should be rated for 150 watts, and the battery should then be capable of 12 volts x 15 amps = 180 watts. For a 3 hour usage you will need a battery of at least 3 x 15 ampere-hours, so a small car battery will be more than sufficient. The battery itself does not really need to be Deep Cycle unless you are likely to forget to recharge it.
Your big disappointment may come with the Solar Charger itself. The biggest I can find from Cabela is only 15 watts, i.e. just over 1 amp of current, and you do need a controller to make sure the battery is not damaged by the charging. For each hour of TV watching you would then need 10 hours or so of sunlit recharging. If you can find a solar charger 5 times bigger it would be more useful, but also rather expensive. Good luck.
Sunforce 50032 15 Watt Solar Battery Charger
