Over the recent years, it has become common place to install a set of powerful and portable solar panels to your campsite to supply trouble free 12v power for virtually endless 12v power at your campsite. It is undeniable that these have become much more common in recent year but you may not be aware of just why these extremely practical and useful systems have become the main go-to for supplying power to your camping setup.

The cost of portable solar power systems used to be prohibitively expensive, however the efforts of 4WD Supacentre and Adventure Kings to drive the cost of camping accessories down lead to providing high performance solar panels with some of the best value solar controllers on the market for prices that are just a fraction of the competition, this is because the solar panel setups are sourced directly from the manufacturer and don’t have the same exorbitant mark ups that other brands have because there are no dealer fee’s, no middle man markups and they ship directly from the supplier to our warehouses across the country.

when looking at the comprehensive solar panel range you might be wondering which unit from the range suits your camping application the most, this will be dependent on a few factors, starting with budget, power requirements, space restrictions, quality of sunlight and quantity of sunlight.

Power requirements

Calculating your power requirements will give you the best starting point when deciding which solar panel you require for your camping setup. Essentially, we want to set out and calculate the demands of every single one of your 12v accessories in a unit called Amp Hours, this is essentially how many amps are consumed on average per hour over a 24-hour period. It can be calculated by looking at the power consumption figures in Amps in the instructions of your device or on the power consumption panel on the back of your devices.

Once you have added up all the figures of your campsites power consumption, you will have a much better idea on which solar panel setup suits your needs!

Battery Capacity

All solar power systems require a battery to store the power generated, this is where the deep cycle, AGM batteries from Adventure Kings come in handy. By converting electrical input to chemical potential, you can collect the energy from the sun to use as you need it, by connecting a solar panel up to your AGM battery setup you can tap into the solar panel output directly with any surplus generated energy being sent to your 12v accessories.

The larger your battery capacity the longer you can stay off grid, however larger battery systems will require a larger solar panel to keep them running.  This is why calculating your amp hour requirements will result in the best possible setup, because you can give yourself a little bit extra capacity as a buffer for unexpected power consumption.

Keep in mind that batteries are rated in a funny way, with their amp hour rating being the maximum capacity before they are fully consumed. By draining your battery to 0% you will cause harm to it and prevent it from being able to be recharged, typically we are looking at around 50% of the rated capacity being essentially as low as you might want to drain your 12v battery before needing to recharging the unit.

Quality of sunlight

When deciding which solar panel, you are chasing, your power requirements are important, but so is the quality of sunlight that you have access to at your camping destination, for an example, if you are camping underneath the canopy of a rainforest, you may not get the most unimpeded light shining on your monocrystalline panels.

The quality of sunlight may vary particularly when you are in areas renowned for overcast conditions, such as in Tassie where you will still get plenty of performance from your solar panel setup, however you might be lacking in the overall output when the clouds begin to block your solar panel, this is why some campers upgrade their solar controller from a standard PWM style controller which is more than capable of getting plenty of sunlight and converting it to charge for your battery and upgrading to a MPPT solar controller unit. The benefit you get from an MPPT controller is the ability to harness the most from your solar panel when the conditions are less than ideal.

An MPPT uses algorithms that monitor the input voltage from the solar panel as well as the voltage of the battery, ambient temperature and ensure that the output current which is charging your batteries is optimized to give you the most charging capability in sub optimum conditions.

Quantity of sunlight

When you are camping in the far north or far south of Australia the less amount of time, for an example, summer in Hobart receives 15+ hours of sunlight per day with the midday sun sitting around 71° off the horizon, it means that you have a whole 15 hours, worth of charging time, where in Cape York this time is limited to just under 13 hours of daylight in summer with the sun sitting a little higher in the sky at 79° above the horizon, during the summer the difference between these locations isn’t too much.

However, during winter these amounts of daylight dramatically change, for example the daylight in Cape York over winter drops to just 11.5 hours of sunlight with the midday sun sitting just about 55° above the horizon, whilst it seems like a large change, compared to Hobart’s reduction down to only 9 hours of day light at just 24° above the horizon, might leave you wanting more.

Because of the reduction of daylight hours, winter may seem like a bit of a hassle for using solar charging, but because of the low angle in the sky and the relatively short path across the sky, a solar panel in the winter months takes much less adjusting through the day to keep the sunlight shining perpendicular offering more efficiency without maneuvering your panel.

Space restrictions

You could equip your setup with a massive solar panel that has more than adequate power output, however you would take up all of your storage space if you were driving a smaller vehicle like a Suzuki sierra or even larger vehicles that are already packed with gear, this is why there are many options for your solar panel capacity.

With folding hard panel’s you get the benefit of them being easy to clean, easy to aim at the sun for the optimum power harnessing no matter what the conditions. But even when these systems are packed up for transporting they take up a lot of space and because of the hard panel nature of these systems aren’t ideal when heading into the roughest conditions found across Australia.

This is where our range of folding solar blankets come in, starting with the 120W folding blanket, this compact unit is small enough to fit underneath your passenger seat taking up around the same amount of space as a larger a4 ring binder. The downside to this compact solar panel setup is its difficulty in aiming it towards the sun, many campers choose to place it on the glass of their windshield to provide a perpendicular angle to the sun’s rays.

If you didn’t have as much space but had the higher power demands, our largest solar blanket the recently released 250W Blanket is perfect for your application. Which even includes folding kickstand legs offering the same versatility as the hard panels without the large packed size.

Budget

Budget is one of the critical factors in deciding which setup you will take home, with a few different models that suit many different applications, and whilst even the top output panels with all the features are relatively affordable, you can now add the benefits of photovoltaics to keep your camping 12v setup running effortlessly in nearly any weather conditions, for nearly an indefinite period of time.

To find out more about the entire range of Adventure Kings Solar charging setups, head to our website at www.4WDSupacentre.com.au call our expert team for specific advice on your setup or drop into one of our company stores to see the gear in person, ask one of our expert team members about your setup and walk away with the perfect addition to your campsite!