12v Solar Battery Charger
Solar Chargers Keep 12V Batteries Maintained
12v Solar Battery Charger options for RV, Car, Boat, Caravan, personal watercraft, riding lawnmower, garden tractor or bike. If it has a 12 volt battery in it here's the need-to-know solar charger guidelines.
Choosing a Solar 12 Volt Battery Charger
For seasonal storage of vehicles and machinery, solar chargers are a great solution that keep batteries full and ready to go for when you need them.
Machinery, rv's, boats, classic and sports vehicles and other seasonal equipment often spend months in storage during times when they're not being used. Batteries don't like to be left unattended for long periods of time and can be damaged when allowed to completely discharge.
You could go and start them every month, but that becomes impractical, especially if they're several miles away (at a boat yard or rv storage facility, or you're in Mexico and your vehicle is in Canada or in Canada when your boat is in Mexico).
The best option we've found is solar chargers that feed a small current into the batteries on sunny days. Small solar panels that make their own current and feed energy to the battery without any intervention from us.
How to Use a 12v Solar Battery Charger
12v solar chargers are used primarily for topping up or recharging a 12 volt battery.
The charger usually consists of a panel, wire and 12 volt connectors (usually a cigarette lighter connector as well as alligator clips) so that the panel can be connected to the battery.All the panel needs is sunlight to start producing a current that it feeds into the battery once it's connected.
The panels are set in a sunny window (the dashboard works well just park the vehicle so the windshield faces the sun) and plug the panel into the cigarette lighter receptacle - or clamp the alligator clips directly to the battery if you'd rather.
Vehicles these days have a lot more systems to support than the ones from "back in the day". Alarm protection requires a constant power source and computerized mechanisms often create a persistent phantom load, sipping small amounts of current from the battery all the time.
Even a super healthy battery needs to be topped up continually to prevent being drained to damaging levels.
A 12v solar battery charger, charges a battery and keeps it charged indefinitely as long as a certain amount of sun reaches the panel each week. Days of low sun will produce less power but one or two sunless days won't affect overall performance.
If you never want to deal with a dead battery again here are some top-notch 12v solar battery options.
Considerations ~ 12v Solar Battery Charger
Although there's a long list of advantages of a 12 volt solar charger, here are a few things to consider in order to get the very most out of your charger.
- Rigid or Flexible? - Rigid photovoltaic panels will produce power for over 30 years and most are guaranteed for 20 years. They're a little more cumbersome than a
flexible panel but more than make up for it in longevity. Also, rigid panels (particularly mono-crystalline) are more efficient at collecting energy.
If you're permanently installing your panel, the rigid style gives you more bang for your buck.
Flexible panels are constructed of thin-film or amorphous cells and collect more spectrums of light than rigid styles. Although not as efficient at collecting bright sunshine they will use early morning, late evening and infrared spectrums that are not available to their rigid counterparts . Also more efficient at extracting light through cloud, thin-film panels are the ideal choice for less sunny areas like the Pacific Northwest, Northeast US and some European nations. - Connectors - Most 12 volt solar chargers come equipped with a 'cigarette lighter' type plug, which can be used inside a vehicle and a pair of alligator clips which can be clipped directly to the battery posts. Check just to make sure.
- Access to Sun - Vehicles that are kept in a windowless shed or garage won't get the required amount of sunlight to keep a constant charge on the batteries.
Smaller vehicles like ATV's and garden tractors will often receive enough juice to start them in a few hours if they're wheeled out into the sunshine and have the solar charger attached at that time. -- In other cases the panel can be outside and wired to the battery inside the building. - Charge Controller? - When using panels over 5 watts you may want to consider a charge controller - many panels have a controller included.
The charge controlling device can protect your system in 2 ways. First, it controls the energy going in to the batteries and prevents the
batteries from overcharging.
Second, the charge controller prevents the discharging of the battery at night or in low light conditions. Without the controller to stop it, the energy in the battery can move in the reverse direction and completely drain the battery.
Not all systems require a charge controller. A rough guideline to follow is - If your charger produces over 2 Watts of solar energy for each 50 battery amp hours a charge controller is a good idea.
The average car battery comes in at 45 amp hours therefore a 1.8 Watt charger would not be able to overcharge that battery but a 5 watt in a very sunny location... might. - Diode - The diode is in place to allow the current to run in only one direction. This is necessary to prevent the energy from leaving the batteries at night and
being discharged through the panels. The diode will allow the energy to flow from the panels to the batteries but not the other way around.
12V Solar Battery Charger Options
2 Sunforce 52012 1.8-Watt Solar Battery Chargers
These panels, there are 2 of them, are designed to deliver a trickle of energy to a 12 volt battery to keep it topped up. 1.8 Watts is enough to maintain a battery over a period of time even if the vehicle is left completely unattended.
This is the best choice for a simple battery maintainer. They provide just enough juice to keep a healthy 12 volt battery continually charged.
We leave an elderly motorhome and a Nissan Pathfinder for 6 months in Alberta (November to April) and they both start up with no coaxing when we get back to them.
HQRP 6 Watt Monocrystalline Flexible Solar Panel
HQRP flexible panels measure approximately - in inches, 21 X 6.5 by .01 - in millimeters, 525 x 160 x 2.5 mm - making them super thin and very lightweight.
This 6 Watt panel is rugged and flexible to 30%. Encased in a durable laminate with silicone protection at the junction box, it becomes a weather tolerant companion for your boat, RV, ATV, snowmobile and other recreational vehicles.
A stainless steel grommet in each corner makes it easy to secure the panel to the boat or RV or just about anywhere else and at almost any angle. It's also easy to move it from place to place.
Flexible means thin film and thin film cells collect spectrums of daylight, dawn and twilight that pv panels leave at the table thus they work really well in places with lower light conditions like the Pacific Northwest.
Weatherproof and packable, flexible panels provide power for ATV's, boats and off-the-beaten-path camping.
Instapark 10 Watt mono-crystalline solar charger
Here's a classy model that comes equipped with its own charge controller so you know your batteries will be protected from overcharge - Even when leaving the RV, boat or vehicle for extended periods in remote areas (like cousin Sharon's farm).
This charger offers 10 watts of solar power packed into a panel that measures in at 14 x 8 x 1 inches or 356 X 204 X 25 millimeters and weighs 3.5 pounds (1.6 Kg)
For situations where you have a constant current draw, like an alarm system, choose this charger that can keep up with a current draw as well as top up the batteries.
The high quality monocrystalline cells make this a long term investment that will last as many as 30 years.
Didn't see what you want? Just type in - 12v solar chargers - to search Amazon's database for a complete list of chargers.
Read the customer reviews for a wealth of information about individual products.
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