Powering Your Electric Devices With A 12V 30W Solar Panel

As the weather warms up, it’s the right time to go outside and enjoy the outdoors. But we need to solve a problem, power shortage. So I got a 2nd-hand 30 watts monocrystalline silicon solar panel. The rated maximum power is 30 watts, the maximum power voltage is 18.68V, the maximum power current is 1.61 amperage, the open-circuit voltage is 22.32V, and the short circuit current is 1.73 amperage.

Here is the junction box with a diode inside. The panel didn’t come with wires, so I temporarily connected the wire myself. The open-circuit voltage tested now is 23.61V. We use the easiest way to connect the solar panel to the automobile cigarette lighters. Let’s check how many devices it can charge at the same time.

Directly connecting the junction box to the cigarette lighters, note that each port can be controlled individually, and a single port supports a maximum output power of 10 watts. Every cigarette lighter now has 5V on it. Let’s test how many pieces of devices it can support.

The first device is Ipad, 5V, 0.9 amperages. And Apple X, 11 watts, Ipad shows 4.7 watts now. Then let’s connect 6SP and see how much we can achieve: Apple X drops to 5.6 watts, Ipad 5 watts, 6SP 4.6 watts, and the total charging power is 15.2 watts. Let’s connect a power bank. After adding a power bank, the output power is more than 5 watts; this one also is more than 5 watts, and this is 4.7 watts, so the total charging power is still about 15 watts. So can a 30 watts solar panel actually only reach 15 watts?

Let’s try to charge all power banks, three power banks. The first one is 9 watts, the second is 3 watts, and the third is 5 watts. The total power is about 17 watts, which is not much different.

A 30 watts solar panel is enough to charge phones and provide simple lighting. It can charge up to three mobile phones at the same time. It takes about 7 hours to charge a 20,000mAh power bank alone fully, and it can emit about 30,000mAh of electricity a day. So I think a panel like this is fine for simply outdoor charging.

Don’t tell me to carry an AGM or GEL battery. Take it will never let you go up the mountain, but you can quickly sink to the bottom when encountering rivers and lakes. However, it’s okay to connect it to a controller and put it at home to light the yard.