Solar panel charging

Would a 50 w solar array work for keeping a bank of 12v sla up to snuff for powering a inverter to power a charger ?

you would be better off to use a balancing charger than using an inverter into a charger.

Most of our chargers will run on DC, and often a significantly lower voltage, though much more than 12V. Check yours first before trying it of course, but definitely forget about the inverter. 50W of solar doesn't sound like enough unless your vehicle is very low power and used about once a week. For running on solar power you have to look at total energy harvested less all losses in and out, and then compare that to total energy usage.

Lastly, I'm not sure your charger will like the squared wave coming out of an inverter. Cheap chargers have pretty high failure rates, so you don't want to do things to increase the risk of failure.

48v 10Ah battery is 480WH.

480WH / 50W = 9.6Hours Charge Time. This is assuming 100% efficiency. It is probably more like 30 hours charge time if you have lots of sun.

yep, i would expect about 20 miles of riding for every week of solar panel charging with this panel. assuming summer sun of about 4-6hours/day.

Thanks for the info will see about getting a larger capacity panel system

I have 110w of pv which gives me about 35miles of ebiking at 20wh/mile per sunny day. It does require moving the panel at least 2x a day which I find easy. Its a dual system. One is for my 74v batts and is a direct connect. The other uses a boost converter to output 58.5v for my 52v batts. Still need a voltage limiter on my main higher voltage panel.

700wh is gained over 9hrs of sun. Pretty efficient since I move the panel

seema34 said:

Solar panel charging is very nice and new thnig

Click to expand...

Wait until you see the solar balance charging kits coming down the pipe.

Yeah, for an e-vehicle you will want more than 50 W unless you ride once a week.

I have 45 watt panel setups that barely keep some of my remote security camera / video transmitters running 24-7 and they only use ~3 -3.5 watts.

This kind of questions gets asked a lot and really, it's like asking "how long is a board?"

To know how much solar you need, you need to know how much power you use and how much sun you have available. You could only need 300watts a day and have 100watts of solar available, but if you have nowhere but shade to park it in, you will get nowhere.

Find out how much power you use. The maximum you can use in a day is the voltage of your battery bank multiplied by the amp hours they are capable of. Then, find a suitable place to place your panels. Realistically, expect to get 2-3 hours of full power over the course of a day. E.g. if you have 100watts of solar, expect to get 200-300 watts that day. Some days you will get more, some days you will get less, but you should ALWAYS plan to get less.

RLT said:

Yeah, for an e-vehicle you will want more than 50 W unless you ride once a week.

I have 45 watt panel setups that barely keep some of my remote security camera / video transmitters running 24-7 and they only use ~3 -3.5 watts.

Click to expand...

I have about 100w of panels. That's 800wh on a good sunny day. Or 40 miles on my ebikes. 25-30 on partly cloudy day. Inefficiency is very small.

I usually move the panel once a day. It's not much trouble, it's on a custom 'trailer bike cart' I built for it.

I have excess solar power.

veloman said:

...I have excess solar power.

Click to expand...

Must be nice.
I have nearly 6KW total solar panels, and ~120 KW storage batteries that run my completely off grid spread, and on days that are cloudy I still watch the meters.

Well, my house is run on the grid power. The solar is just for ebike charging. I would like to find a cost effective way to use the excess, but it's not easy. In the winter I could just hook it up to an incandescent bulb inside for heating the house. The grid power is Austin Green Choice which is TX wind.