Spring is definitely here and if you are looking at getting you and your friends and family out camping, you most certainly require a reliable source of campsite power.

Up until very recently there weren’t many options for campsites, that was until brands like Adventure Kings drove the prices of portable regulated 12v photovoltaic systems down to unbelievably low prices.

Starting with a typical campsite portable solar panel the Adventure Kings 160W Solar Panel – this panel rumbled and shook many brands on the market who relied on the lack of healthy competition to turn profit.

The Adventure Kings 160W Solar Panel is an extremely capable solar charging system, with fold out legs, and an integrated PWM solar regulator is capable of outputting a huge 8.75 Amps, at 13.4-14.0 VDC, the panel includes a long 5m cable and alligator clips to attach it directly to your battery.

This panel single handedly rattled the cages of many “leading” Australian portable solar retailers, offering campers a cost-effective way to recharge their battery setups.

The introduction of the Adventure Kings 250W panel fed the high demand for a larger output panel that was capable of maintaining much larger power demands with it’s regulated 13.52 Amp output, without busting your camping budget and with nearly double the capacity of output for a fraction of an increase in price.

The subsequent release of the folding ‘blanket’ offered campers a more flexible compact and customizable way to bring 120W of solar charge wherever you are travelling.  Being able to fold small enough to stash in your rear seat storage pouch they definitely are one of the most versatile and best value solar charging systems on offer.

When calculating your potential charging ability, you MUST consider the overall power consumption of all of your 12v accessories. Once you figure that out, you have a better idea of what kind of system you need to outfit your campsite with!

Calculating how much power you need, involves the multiplication of your accessory’s amp draw over how many hours it will be used in a 24-hour period. For an example, if you consider an Adventure Kings 60L Fridge freezer having an average power consumption of up to around 0.7-1.0Ah over 24 hours of constant usage, you will average between 16.8 – 24 Amp hours of battery depletion.

Taking all of your accessories Amp hour consumption into account you have calculated the overall power needs of your system.

In ideal circumstances you have between approximately 9 and 14 hours of usable daylight depending on what time of year and where abouts in oz.

Now you have the amount of daylight hours in your area, you can multiply this by the amperage rating of our solar panel range to figure your ideal panel, for an example, the Adventure Kings 120W Solar Blanket, coupled with only 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter would afford your setup a massive 66.15 Amps of battery charge! When comparing with the Adventure Kings 250W Folding panel being able to freely gather a massive 120 amps in the same time frame you can see there is a HUGE difference between the potential charging power with nearly double the output being possible from the 250W system.

With all of the facts at hand you can easily figure out which 12v photovoltaic system is perfect for your setup, and just to err on the side of caution you should always factor in an element of error for overcast days, and less than perfect panel positioning, you may also want to consider the benefits of upgrading from the included PWM solar regulator to a much higher efficiency unit like the Adventure Kings MPPT or a CTEK D250SA which uses cleverly monitors the supply and the battery voltage to ensure that the circuit maximises the performance to make sure it performs well, even in less than ideal circumstances.

Thanks to the hard work from Adventure Kings you can now set your campsite up with an extremely efficient, cost effective and high performance portable 12v solar panel system for easier camping and trouble free 12v system operation no matter where you are setup!