Author Topic: no real panels available,can i try with solar garden lamps tiny panels  (Read 2909 times)

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solartec

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please,anyone tried to connect togheter tiny solar panels(4/4``) from garden lamps to gain enough current to supply a phone or a laptop?
is it possible to do that?thank you

Bruce S

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It is possible, however you will need quite a few of them just for any type of newer phone.
Best would be to link up enough to make twice to voltage needed.
BEST Google joule-thief and follow those instructions.
Laptops are a big jump, but if you have enough of them, go for it, BUT it will take a very very long time to charge, since they are probably only put out about 1.5Vdc and around 0.02ma.
Best of Luck
A kind word often goes unsaid BUT never goes unheard

Mary B

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If you can find a VW junkyard a lot of them had solar panels on the roof to charge the battery. Ebay will have panels available that could be shipped to you.

Xan

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Re: no real panels available,can i try with solar garden lamps tiny panels
« Reply #3 on: January 23, 2015, 05:10:06 PM »
When I did my very first experiments with solar power back in 2004 I made a "panel" up by mounting a dozen or so solar garden light tops to a board. It kind of looked a little like those old panels with the round cells but was not very grunty. It was good enough though to keep an old car battery kind of charged up and run some little LED lights that I made from clusters of the LED lamps from those same garden lights. Was fun to experiment with, and at the time real solar panels were well beyond my budget.

When we were living in a rental about five years ago the toilet had no light fixture installed! It relied on being illuminated from a fanlight window through to the shower room. Was not ideal. So I made up another of these "arrays" of solar garden light panels to run a small LED bulb that screwed into a minature edison screw fitting. Originally I used a 6V SLA battery, but that was pretty stuffed and soon proved no good. So I replaced it with a couple of LiFe cells from an old laptop battery. That was much better, however the LED lamp was not very good either and started to fail. I ended up just putting in a little panel light into the socket and although that drew significantly more current, it was much brighter and the solar/battery kept up with it fine until we shifted into our new house and removed it.

That array is still sitting in the garden but it is looking worse for wear from all the years of UV exposure. Last time I measured it's output for curiosity  it didn't really seem to have any.