Its solar power season, but if you haven’t set yourself up with solar power yet, then don’t get burned and simply grab a hold of the first solar panel you find out there without doing any research first to take  full advantage of the solar season.

There are many factors to consider when choosing a reliable solar panel, and each one will make a dramatic difference to just how much juice your setup can produce and with the right factors considered you can determine exactly which solar panel setup will suit your setup.

Camp power requirements

Before upgrading anything in your portable camping power setup, its wise to do some quick math’s on exactly what the demands of your system are, so you can plan a system that has a little bit of a surplus output, for when the weather conditions don’t play fair.

A good way to work out your campsite power requirements is to add up the amount of power required by all of your accessories and for how long they will need to run, most 12v appliances advertise an average power consumption as well as a peak power consumption. We take the average power consumption and multiply it by the hours that your appliance will be running.

For example, a Kings 60L Fridge Freezer will consume an average of 0.7-1 Amp per hour, and will run for 24 hours a day this means you will need between 16.8-24 Amp hours of charging capacity to maintain charge in your indefinitely. In this instance a 120W folding solar blanket will provide up to 9.6Amps of charge, meaning you can run your fridge, on just 2.5 hours of good sunshine.
 

Panel style

There are a bunch of different, styles of solar panel, but the most effective for the money is easily the monocrystalline style of panels which combine efficiency with affordability for the best in portable solar panel setups.

Adventure Kings entire range of solar panels are monocrystalline, offering the perfect efficiency at camp and off the grid resulting in requiring a much smaller panel for the same panel output.

Panel rating

Ratings are a complicated business, with all manner of environmental conditions affecting the real world output its hard to know exactly what size panel you might need.

Watts = Voltage x Amps

This formula gives us an idea of what the panel is truly capable of, with a voltage output of around 12.5v from the regulator the wattage can be divided by 12.5 to give us the amps that are going into our battery.

However, these calculations only apply when the sun is shining bright, and on overcast or rainy days you will lose a large percentage of output and could result in only having a small amount of “reserve” charge for your 12v setup.

Solar regulator

Solar panels on their own offer up a raw and uneven power output, which can cause issues with your battery, considering the raw output from your panel is around 22 volts depending on the model, this means that you need something to moderate the output to protect your battery, which is where a solar regulator comes in.

There are 2 main types of solar regulation on the market, the PWM solar regulator and an MPPT regulator.

PWM is the most affordable variety on the market, offering a simple, no frills way to drop voltage down whilst increasing amperage for more efficient charging ability usually fitted with circuit protection against overheating and overcharging, they are typically included with most solar panels on the market.

MPPT A Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) Controller takes this one step further by applying a sophisticated charging algorithm that can constantly track the amount of power that the solar panel is generating from the sun and make the most of it

The most recent update to the Adventure Kings solar panel range is to include the MPPT style controllers with all ready to use solar products, this saves you a mountain of cash and also provides more efficiency, with up to 30% more charge in overcast conditions.

Solar panel design

There are a handful of solar panel designs on the table within the range of Adventure Kings Solar Panels, starting with the hard panel folding variety which all include kickstands for aiming at the sun directly, there are also Adventure Kings Solar Blankets which are designed to fold up into a compact package, which makes them easy to store in your vehicle on the way to camp, but also the folding and fabric mounted backing makes this style of panel more resilient to damage in transit as the panel surface is backed by padding.

Finally, the range at 4WD Supacentre includes fixed style panels, offering hard aluminium framed models as well as tough and low profile semi flexible varieties.

There is a solar panel for everyone at 4WD Supacentre, seeing its solar panel season get your hands on the best panel for your needs at the lowest possible prices in Oz!

to get your setup dialed, head to www.4WDSupacentre.com.au drop into one of our fully stocked showrooms, or call our call centre to secure the best bargain on your off grid power supply!