Solar Battery Chargers

[motley man]

Does anyone use solar charger/maintainers to keep fish house batteries charged? Do they work when having a small fan running off the battery?

[motley man]

Anybody have any info????

[low277]

I think it would depend on the size of the solar panel in watts vs the amount of watts that your fan consumes. If you have a 20 watt solar panel charging a battery which has less than 20 watts of load on it, you should be able to stay out quite some time, depending on sun/cloud conditions.

At work a few years ago we installed a couple of 100 watt solar panels on the roof of a semi trailer that the field test engineers use when testing in remote locations. The solar panels where tied into a system which included 3 optima batteries and a inverter to convert 12vdc to 120vac for test equipment. They also had a on board generator and/or shore power if available.

After a few years of use the batteries are holding up great, and the engineers like the ability of not running the generator. During the day the battery/solar system is sufficient to provide all the power they need.

[Moose]

Motley Man, Are you thinking for like a Flasher battery?

I think it would be great to put a small solar array on the portable to charge the small flasher battery during the day to make sure you have enough power at night to run the flasher and the LEDs for a while. Not sure if there are any on the market that are flexible enough to fold up into my Voyager so I wouldn't have to take it off every time I moved.