Spring camping is upon us, many 4WDers and campers are familiar with or own a dual battery system and understand the requirements of a 12v system particularly when you are out in the bush for a few days at a time.

Generally if you are running a handful of 12v accessories such as a 12v refrigerator and a handful of camping lights along with charging all your accessories like your USB charging phones and even your GPS Navigator you are going to seriously need to consider alternative options to just a deep cycle battery sitting on its own.

To give some perspective on a typical camping power consumption, we would be looking at an Adventure Kings 60L Fridge Freezer requiring around 1-1.5 Amps every hour, this totals a requirement over 24 hours of just 36 Amps add on around 2 amps for around 2 hours for your phone equaling 4 amps and around 5 amps for 3 hours for your campsite LED Lighting, you will be sitting around 55 amp hours after just 24 hours at camp.

This may sound like gobbledygook, but to give some clarity on how much juice this is a Kings 115ah AGM Deep Cycle Battery will have a safety buffer of around 50% capacity to prevent permanent damage being done leaves us with around 57.5 amps worth of usable capacity when we are at camp.

With all the accessories listed above we are looking at around, 2.5amps of reserve capacity, whilst a capacity of just over 24 hours might be suitable for shorter overnight trips, if you are heading out for more than just a quick weekend escape then you may want some form of auxiliary charging to top your 12v setup back up to capacity and maintain enough charge for extended escapes away!

This is where portable and easy to use 12v solar comes in, for many years, portable solar panels were extremely space inefficient, taking up massive amounts of space inside your vehicle, and only trickling juice into your battery. not only were they inefficient, and clunky, you needed to purchase a controller, and spend an arm and a leg on a system suitable and durable enough to be used in the bush.

Things have advanced over the last few years, and you can now purchase incredibly compact and powerful solar panels at a fraction of the cost of what you might expect packing down to a fraction of the size of older designs, making them the perfect backup power supply when you hit the tracks!

Particularly through the sunnier months of the year. With even a mild and extremely affordable setup on the perfect day for solar charging you can harvest over 14 hours of sunlight (in places like Tassie even over 15 hours of sun) offering your camp setup well over 100amps worth of charging capability for your setup, this is more than 40 amps of charge in surplus, meaning your battery will stay at 100% throughout the day and have plenty of spare charge to keep your accessories rolling throughout the night!

The range of 12v Solar Panels available in the Adventure Kings range is perfect for campers wanting a little bit of a boost in power for their portable 12v setups.

Starting with the simplest, most compact and portable in the Adventure Kings Solar Panel lineup, the Kings 120W Portable Solar Blanket, takes advantage of eight high output mono-crystalline panels and includes everything you need to simply plug and play to your 12v setup, this includes a PWM solar charge controller, 4.4m of heavy gauge cable and a set of alligator connectors, all utilizing a fast connect, Anderson styled connector which makes the setup extremely modular and simple to connect to just about any setup, all for no additional cost.

The Kings 120W Solar blanket offers automatic charge adjustment with its PWM regulator, this means that it optimizes the output for charging your 12v power bank and will protect your 12v setup by cutting out the charging current as soon as your battery reaches 100% capacity. In optimal light conditions this panel can blast out 7.41A of current which is plenty of juice for most setups, the trouble with a setup like the 120w solar blanket is that on overcast days it will reduce the potential output by many factors.

Overcast days can reduce the output of a solar panel by about 70-75% this means when it isnt clear and sunny, your 120W solar blanket will be putting out just 1.85amps per hour, over a 14 hour day is just 25 amps of solar charging ability.

This is where the 200W Folding Solar Blanket comes in, with nearly double to capacity of the 120w panel, the 200W Folding Solar Blanket has the ability on a sunny day to output a huge 14.6 amps per hour, this massive jump in amperage output to a huge 200 amps over just 14 hours of sunlight, with many of the same benefits as the 120W panel including a PWM regulator and extension leads, the 200W has the additional benefit to being able to still put out 52 amps of charge during an overcast day. Which is just about what a typical small campsite requires over a 24-hour period.

This huge step up in power supply makes the 200W panel a much more capable unit when it comes to still providing charge in less than optimal conditions!

The additional benefits you can encounter by running your campsite off of solar power is that it is essentially free energy and practically silent and extremely efficient at running your whole setup!

So, don’t hesitate get your hands on highly reliable solar, for a fraction of the cost of what you could imagine. To find out more about the entire range of 12v solar charging equipment, and other extremely affordable camping equipment, head to www.4WDSupacentre.com.au call us on 1800 88 39 64 or visit us in store to speak directly with an expert in person.