I’ve seen reports that outdoor solar garden lamps make good indoor lighting. Has anyone thought of this or tried it? My take on it is that you would let it “charge” during the day and then bring it inside at night for light without batteries or flame. Comments?
Highly unlikely. Most are cheap junk from China. They put out little light and don’t have enough solar cells or batteries to last very long.
If you are serious, spend the money on a good solar panel (they are rated in watts) that will directly charge a small 12V SLA (Sealed Lead Acid) battery. The battery should be sized for how much the solar panel can produce. As an example if you get a 20W panel and have 8 hours of sunshine you will generate a maximum of 20W X 8Hrs = 160Whrs of power. A small SLA for a motorcycle will easily hold that. In actual practice the power you can produce will be something - much less depending on how much sunshine you actually have, if you rotate the panel to follow the sun, et cetera. Use the 12V source to power a FLOURESCENT light as they provide the most lumens for the watt (other than LED lamps which are much more expensive).
You can get the panels from the alternate energy solar electric providers. 12V flourescent lamps are available from RV part suppliers and maybe camping supply places (however they are probably 6V lights). Or check places like:
Also try: http://www.kansaswindpower.net/ http://tinyurl.com/bopt4( Advanced Solar ) http://tinyurl.com/7ehrs(Backwoods solar) I have bought from each of these companies and have been treated ok. Hope the link works, I have never used tiny url service.
How would a small string of LED Christmas lights compare? They’re not very expensive (especially after Boxing Day!)
LEDs are very low power but unless they are concentrated they will not do except for low level lighting. You can get LED flashlights which are very power thrifty. For reading and area lighting a panel, battery, small inverter( 12 to 120 volts )and flourescent lights is a good bet. Or as suggested above the 12 volt flourescent will eleminate the need for the inverter.
Buy the River Rock Mini Lanterns from Target. They use 4 AA batterys and are LED. They will run about 22 hours on 4 2500mah rechargable batteries.
Get a good battery charger like the Maha FS401.
The solar panel idea and 12V light idea is right on also, just harder to move around a big battery. Using the solar panel to charge the big deep cycle battery to keep all the valuable solar energy, and chargign the AA’s off the SLA is the way to go.
Try and stay 12V, ANY time you convert 12V to 120V to power something you loose energy in the process. Try and keep as much as possible on 12V. Somethings will have to run on 120 so having an inverter is a good idea. They are so reasonable now it makes sense to get a good one.
We take an old car battery with us to the mountains to run our 12V lights in the cabin. The current battery is 3 years old (since it wouldn’t start the car anymore.) They still have enough capacity to operate a couple 12V flourescent lights for 3–4 hours/day for 4 days. We tried adding a small solar panel to recharge it but couldn’t get enough direct sunlight down in the valley. It would require a whole lot of $$$$$ panels to get enough power so we just bring it home and recharge it.
I’ve also used a much smaller (and lighter) 17AHR battery. It is a new one that was originally from a wheel chair. Again, it has enough capacity for a few days of use before needing recharging.
Basically, how much battery capacity you need depends on how many watts the light is consuming, how long you operate it, and what you have to recharge the battery. The higher the load the less capacity a SLA battery actually has. As an example the capacity of a SLA batery is typically rated at a 20 hour discharge rate. If you pull a smaller load you will have more run capacity and if you pull a larger load you will have less. How much depends on the individual battery and you would have to refer to the spec sheet. Then there is the affect of temperature, age, the number of deep discharge cycles that have occured, how the battery is charged, etc.
If one is going to do this sort of thing often, a car battery won’t last that long because they are not deep discharge type batteries. But if you have them leftover anyway, they are basically free. A deep discharge battery typically has thicker lead in the cells. A Hawker/Gates, Optima or most SLAs designated as a “marine” battery are designed for deep discharging. Even then, how long the battery will last or the number of deep discharges you can get before the storage capacity starts dropping notably depends on how far and how many deep discharge cycles the battery has experienced. In general, you never want to discharge any 12V SLA below 10.5VDC.
Everytime you convert from DC to AC to DC you lose power. At least 10% and more like 20–25% on each conversion. That means you want to operate lights directly from 12VDC if at all possible. LEDs are the most efficient (more lumens/watt) followed by 12VDC operating flourescents (they have an internal DC/AC conversion). For occasional use (e.g. the light in the outhouse) you can use very innefficient but low costing 12VDC incadescents (i.e. the dome lamp bulb in your car). The last thing you want to do is operate 110VAC lights off a battery through an inverter. BTW: most inverters have an idle load that drains the battery even when nothing is connected to the inverter.
If you can find a NIMH battery charger that operates on 12V (one that plugs into the cigarette lighter on a car) you have close to the ideal solution for providing power for emergency and off-grid lighting. NIMH batteries are designed for deep discharge and, with proper charging, you will get a lot of cycles before they go bad.
I know this site is not for profit, but somehow some among us might want to move forward and make a business out of (sensible, open, checkable) pandemic preparedness. It makes sense not to do it. It makes sense to do it. Whatever. :-?
Lugon, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
“I’ve seen reports that outdoor solar garden lamps make good indoor lighting. Has anyone thought of this or tried it? My take on it is that you would let it “charge” during the day and then bring it inside at night for light without batteries or flame. Comments? “
Yes, I purchased 4 of these cheapo solar lights about a month ago for just this purpose for our low-tech home. And returned them to the store the next week. The light produced was simply worthless. I tested them in a dark hall, and with a full charge on a very sunny Nov day, it wasnt even bright enough to not hit into the walls, and the charge lasted only 3–4 hours. A real disappointment. If you are tech-challenged as we are, and dont want things that run on batteries, you might want to invest in a few wind-up flashlights as we did. Ours are from costco, 2 for about $20, and one windup does last over an hour. And are safer than candles.
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