How good is the solar chargers

[adamr]

Im looking at also adding a solar charger. To the shack i have a honda gen now but when my freinds use the house and i have the generator it would be nice to get some charge back in them. Im looking at a 18 watt charger at menards for 100 bucks and mounting it to the front v and just always parking facing south. Any advice?

[Fishin4fun_MN]

They work, but are slow.

[Whoaru99]

Consider that during full light that 18W solar panel is basically a 1A trickle charger. If that puts back all the charge you need it then it'll do what you want.

To get an idea...

Say your battery is 100 amp-hours and you drain it down by 25%. That's 25 amp-hours. To return the battery to full charge you have to replace those 25 amp-hours (plus a little more). So, if you have a 1A trickle charge it would take something more than 25 hours to do it. And, since this is a solar panel and there is only roughly 9 hours of daylight, that'd be three days to recharge the battery.

So, IMO, if you need a maintainer to keep the battery topped up while you're away it would be great. If you need to recharge the battery for repeated uses then not so good.