Solar Charger for Ice House

[Cottco]

Volkswagon issued a small 12" square solar panel with cigarette plug - apparently to work as a trickle charger for their autos. I purchased one of these on hsolist last year hoping to use as a trickle charger for the fish house battery - (12V Deep Cycle 625 amp). Any insight would be welcome - can I expect this to work? There is a fuse in the plug and I have a 15 amp fuse on my house battery. Thanks for your help.

[HarryG]

http://www.fishingminnesota.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB30&Number=857626&fpart=&PHPSESSID=

Here is a link about charging batteries. It really depends on your needs. There are several options for charging batteries.

I hope this helps.

[Cottco]

Appreciate the link, but I want to know if the VW charger will work - any electrical guru's care to wiegh in? I took the solar charger plug apart to find that there is circuit board with numerous capacitors, resistors, etc. Looking forward to your responses.

[spotter]

I don't think that chrager will do anything for you, they don't put out enough watts, I think they are designed to keeps batteries fresh on a car that is parked for a long period of time. don't get me wrong it will charge your battery but not near enough, I don't think solar chargers are the way to go on fish houses, for one thing the sun isn't all that strong in the winter and you would have to use several solar chargers to do any good. Go ahead and use it if you want but i wouldn't rely on it.

[JCR]

I use solar panels on my cabin, and they are about 6 square feet and supply 64 watts. A one square foot panel would be around 10 watts or less. That corresponds to one amp (12watt/12v=1amp). Since your battery is 625 amphour, it would take 625 hours to charge, if it was fully discharged. Since you only get about eight hours of sun a day, it would take about 75 sunny days to charge the battery. Therefore that panel is only useful to maintain a battery with no draw on it.

[Cottco]

Great Feedback - I just hooked up the meter to find that the panel puts out 13.86 Volts at approximately 15 mah - hooked in series - there are diodes in the plug of the solar panel to prevent the battery from dumping back to the panel. At this point, I will use it to help maintain a freshly charged battery on extremely cold days - should winter decide to show up. Thanks for your input!

[fishinalot]

I use a 15 watt solar charger in my Fish House. All winter I only took out the battery twice to recharge it. I'm only using 4 lights every night, but the charger saved me quite a few trips back to the garage where my electric battery charger is.