solar power is awesome and harnessing it is awesome too because it's just kind of
usually around during the day especially in somewhere like mexico while we are
right now well it can power devices if you have solar panels connected to them
and it can power cities if you have giant networks of solar panels connected
to them it can also make it kind of hard to see which is why i'm squinting
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one thing that has gotten rather popular lately is the advent of solar panels for
stuff like hiking or solar panels for charging things like small battery banks
or your cell phone seven eight watt five watt solar panels that claim to be able
to charge your device that sounds pretty cool and you see pictures of people
strapping them to their backpacks and stuff and then going hiking through the jungle
how applicable is that how well do those actually work that is the sole reason
why we came to mexico okay that's not necessarily true but it is one of the
things we'll be doing here the first two solar panels i want to introduce are the
anker 8 watt and the all powers 8 watt they look actually almost identical but
there are some minor differences they both claim 8 watts at 5 volts and 1 amp
so i might have limited knowledge here but
i don't think that's how that works but oh well we'll test that later on both of
them have little cable loops where you can attach carabiners or something like
that to attach it to your bag both have little pouches where you can manage
things like maybe putting a battery in and both have a tethered usb port so you
can move them around which is actually rather nice neither of them feature a
kickstand neither of them feature a battery these are pretty bone standard
solar panels the goal zero offering is a seven watt number which closes using
magnets which is actually kind of nice has little loops for carabiners comes
with two carabiners and has its pouch on the outside inside pouch there is a 12
watt connection a usb connection a connection for their guide 10 which is
another device that goal zero offers and a chain input so that you can connect a
bunch of these together it also features no battery no kickstand and claims that
it can charge your phone entirely in one to two hours so we're gonna see how true
that is so when it comes to these solar panels they have lots of warnings and
notices and whatnot on them telling you that efficiency will be hampered if you
have a cloudy day if it's if it's not that sunny if it's different various
conditions can affect it if it's not tilted towards the sun
well we're in mexico it's pretty obvious where the sun is there are very very few
clouds i really don't think that's going to be an issue so let's see how well
they stack up to their claims so what i have here is a usb amperage voltage
tester that is plugged into the unit and then hidden under it because it's
incredibly hard to read in the sun then it's about noon-ish and the sun is right
above us so i'm just going to hold the solar panel basically like this and try
to read the reader which will be below it and i'll tell you guys the readout
and then maybe we'll try to get some footage of it but that's going to be really difficult so the all powers is
the first one that i'm testing and with a little bit of plus or minus on both of
these calculations it's reading at about five ish volts or 4.9 and it's reading
at about .85.9 amps the anker solar panel is
running at about 0.9 amps and about 4.9
to 5 volts unsurprisingly extremely similar to the all powers eight watt so
the goal zero is a little bit harder to read because the connector is fixed into the
body instead of being on a tether but we're running at about 4.9
volts and waiting for it to switch over
about 0.7 amps so not quite as strong as
the other ones edel and i noticed some key differences
between the goal zero panel and the anchor slash all powers panels in
between testing one eds will notice that there's a much more glossy finish on the
goal zero and a very much matte finish on the anchor and all power solar panels
also the line density on the anchor and all power panels is much higher than the
goal zero panel and the goal zero logo takes up more space than the anker and
all powers one so there's just overall more panel and this big guy gets a solid
five volts one amps in the sun so what one is this one i didn't introduce it
well this is a 20 watt neck tech which looks like it's basically built in the
same place as the all powers and anchor solar panels the reason why i wanted to
show this off is the other smaller ones are often shown off as hiking solar
panels but in not completely perfect conditions aren't always that great so
this one did exactly five volts one amp in the sun which a little weird
considering it claims to be a 20 watt panel my battery can take 1.7 amps but
it's only outputting 1 amp if it wanted to be 20 watts as far as i can tell at 5
volts because of usb 2.0 it should be two amps out of both of its output ports
because it has usb 1 and usb 2. well usb
number one and usb number two not usb version one usb version two don't worry
about it anyways so i'm a little bit not stoked about the specs on all of these
guys although if i'm doing something wrong in terms of calculations let me know in the comments down below but now
let's test in the shade one of the most commonly shown off scenarios for these
solar panels is just attaching them to the back of your backpack and going for
a hike in the jungle or a forest that's going to cast shade on them for a huge
percentage of the time and they are almost never going to be at an ideal
angle so let's test that as well what i'm doing is i stepped into the shade
just outside of the sunlight and i have them vertical while the sun is directly
above us this is not an ideal position the crazy 20 watt that we just tested is
running at 5 volts which is great kind of expected that and at about
0.65 amps which is actually really solid
considering how it's positioned that can probably be attributed to the fact that
it not only has a third solar panel but it's also much larger per solar panel
than the other guys the width is about the same but the height has increased a
very noticeable amount this guy is much smaller standing in more or less the
same spot the goal zero struggles to get to 0.1 of an amp sometimes going as low
as 0.08 sometimes going as high as 0.12
not very much you're going to struggle to charge a lot of devices on this the
anchor doesn't fare all that much better 5 volts just like all the rest of them
all the time its amperage goes at about 0.15 to 0.17
still a little bit sketchy if you want to charge a lot of different devices my
cheero tuff would reject all of these the all power is yet again proving that
the anchor and the l powers are probably more or less the same thing having the
same voltage and save amperage as the anchor so our camera is giving us a
temperature warning and to be completely honest i'm done we've tested in the sun
we've tested in the shade we've tested improper angles all that kind of stuff i
don't think brand ended up being a huge factor here what ended up being a huge
factor here was surface area the big
massive one with three panels and a taller overall design did quite well in
the shade and in the sun the anchor and the all powers which were more or less
the same performed more or less the same
and then the goal zero which had some glossy panels which as far as i know
seems like a poor choice but i don't design these things so i could
be wrong and had smaller overall panels didn't do quite as well as the others
fairly straightforward one thing that i am frustrated about is the math on this
kind of stuff maybe i just have no idea what's going on in terms of solar
calculations you guys can let me know on twitter at luke underscore afr go there
call me stupid let me know in the comments down below but i don't understand how 5 volts 1 amp equals 7
watts or 8 watts and how 5 volts one amp and five volts one amp on one solar
panel equals 20 watts i have no idea how that's supposed to work and we didn't
get those calculations here what we did get here was like in ideal conditions
five watts on all of them so yeah let me
know comments down below another thing that i did find was that you're probably
not gonna want these seven or eight watt panels
i would recommend something like the 20 watt panel at a minimum why because the
wattage number no because of the three larger panels that were on that charger
giving you much more dynamic positions that you can be in it can be on your
backpack at a not ideal position and still charge a fair amount off the sun
another thing to pay attention to is what you're charging certain devices
aren't gonna like being charged at not one full amp i know my chiro tuff is a
little bit particular about different things because it wants to save the
battery that's inside which is a good thing for a durable battery and the
slightly less scrupulous chiro ingress charger didn't care as
much and was able to charge off of all of them at pretty much whatever amperage
you threw at it so pay attention to what battery you're pairing with these things
get a bigger better panel and i hope you guys enjoyed the video
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check out the forum to discuss about how i probably don't know math because all
of the companies did some weird math anyways i'll see you guys next time