Over the last decade solar power for the home has become more and more affordable and accessible and due to the massive increase in research and development of the technology means you can now get a reasonably powerful system for much less money. Thanks to the advancements in technology many campers are reaping massive benefits to the massive amount of charging ability afforded by an extremely light weight solar panel.

There are many reasons why Solar has taken over campsites, you may not be an electricity specialist but there are plenty of differences between the power out of the socket at home and the power you need at camp starting with AC power from home, this is designed to put incredible amounts of power through the socket to drive components with moving parts like washing machines, air conditioners and so forth. The challenge with turning solar into AC is that solar technology naturally outputs a DC current in one direction, this then has to be run through an inverter to put AC power back into the grid and help run your appliances.

When setting up your campsite with a self-maintaining DC charging system, the Adventure Kings Solar Panel range is perfect, thanks to not only the massive output but also to the feature packed package all bundled for an incredible price range. by using solar for a 12v setup you will find that you take advantage of the natural DC output created by a solar panel setup. No matter where you take advantage of a solar panels ability to convert sunlight into electrical power, you will 100% in every application require a solar regulator. The role of a regulator is to meter out the electricity coming from the panel to optimise the output providing the maximum amount of charging ability, as well as being able to prevent overcharging to your 12v battery within the system.

A 12v solar panel is perfect for camping, and despite what you may think, doesn’t power accessories directly, but rather will charge your battery back up to 100% through your solar regulator of choice allowing you to continue to drain your batteries with all of your 12v accessories from, fridge freezers completely independently of your vehicles crank battery setup.

A solar panel doesn’t just output clean 12v power with fluctuations between cloud cover, angle of sunlight and the condition of your battery.

There are 2 main ways to regulate solar the first is PWM, this stands for pulse width modulation, this means it automatically adjusts artificial pulses of power from the solar panel from shorter more sparsely spaced pulses to much longer more closely spaced pulses that fill in a larger duty cycle percentage. This system is the same that is included with most of the Adventure Kings solar panels.

The second style of solar controller is the MPPT style of controller. MPPT stands for Maximum Power Point Tracking, which works in a similar way to a DC-DC charger by adjusting voltage and amperage ensuring the maximum possible charge is available to your setup, the benefit to an MPPT is it’s ability to monitor exactly how much power (wattage) is coming from your panel and modify the output for an impressive output that is up to 30% higher than similar regulators in obverse conditions such as when it is a little bit overcast or even squally.  

With the benefits of different solar regulators broken down, the next thing to look at is to see how much power your campsite will actually need to help decide on a solar panel that is suitable for your setup.

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When assessing your solar setup you need to look at just how much power your campsite uses on a day to day basis, for example if you are running an Adventure Kings 60L Fridge freezer which has approximately 0.7 – 1.0Ah of power consumption, to extrapolate this out to a 24 hour period, we get between 16.8 – 24 amps of charge, adding in an additional 4 – 5 amps of charge to keep our Adventure Kings 1.3M LED Strip Light powered through the night  and about 6 Ah for our USB phone chargers.  We have only used about 35 amps of battery over a whole day.  Looking at our relatively mild power demands from our fridge freezer, and camp lighting we can easily get away with our smaller more manageable Adventure Kings 120w Portable Solar Blanket, this compact unit blasts out a massive 7.35A maximum per hour.

In Australia we get a minimum of 9 hours of daylight even in the far south of Tassie during the coldest darkest months, this means you can charge up to 66 Amps of charging capacity through the daylight hours, easily maintaining the charging requirements of our simple setup.

If you had a much more power hungry setup, by jumping into our larger Adventure Kings 70L Dual Zone Camping Fridge we demand much more power from our batteries with an average power consumption up to 2.5Amps every hour, coupled with one of our completely customizable Illuminator 5 Bar Camp lighting kits which demands about 7.5 amps an hour for 4 or 5 hours reaching a huge 37.5 Amps of power, adding to the 60 Amps from the fridge freezer resulting in a beastly 97.5 Amps or power consumption over a 24 hour period for this larger consumption of power, it’s a great idea to setup your camp with a larger solar panel like the Adventure Kings 250W Folding Solar panel, with a maximum output of 13.52 Amps of charge, it is capable of outputting just over 121 Amps of charge in a full day of direct sunlight. This would most certainly cover your needs and get your campsite cranking without even needing to pack up and head home!


To find out more about the incredible value Adventure Kings Solar Panel range and for all the latest prices head to https://www.4wdsupacentre.com.au/products/solar.html call us on 1800 88 39 64 or even drop into one of our stores or dealers to speak with one of our in store experts, to get the best value for money for your camping solar setup!