I’m only half kidding. I’m a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.
Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn’t much but it’s a start.
In the event of an apocalypse basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights.
My house is quite rural and I have a water well with a battery backup for the pump and UV filter. The battery lasts for about 5-6 days depending on use. I can charge the battery from the grid or with solar.
If the cities get nuked, my well system will still function.
Can you repair it if it breaks?
I get water from 800ft underground. Not a long term solution but being able to drink, cook, and bathe for a few weeks or months is going to be important. It is useful to be able to power the pump with batteries charged by the sun until enough people have died so I can migrate to a more tolerant climate without having to mad max it.
There are power tools that run on batteries these days. I don’t know about you, but a chainsaw seems pretty useful to me.
At 30watts max I guess you can cut a log or two every once and a while sure.
Electric fire starter. Mesh nodes. Walkie talkies. Small computer with offline Wikipedia and Google maps. GPS may still be working for a while, so that would be useful to charge and use. Portable fans. MP3 player or other entertainment device. Camera. Small power tool batteries…
Yeah, in an apocalypse, a small about of electricity would be a luxury.
Look: I plan solar panels, batteries, and a small TV set, so during the apocalypse, I will have my Netflix shows! And with the right EV, I will be one of the few who can still go to Costco!
You see: I’m ready!!
gasmask, radiation tablets and suits, a working moter bike and a ton of gas are higher on my list.
How long does gasoline keep?
2 or so year, but that long enough to get you to where you need to, if it take over 2 years of driving to get what you need and you can’t find any more, sorry but you were probubly fucked from the get go
You underestimate the amount of digital hoarders out there.
Or maybe hoarders overestimate how much and how long they can rely on their digital stuff.
Once you let go of heating and cooling, larger temperature variations are going to do a number on you consumer grade electrical devices. Your solar panels are one heavy hails storm away from destruction, and if we assume climate change is the cause of the apocalypse, you can count on those.
The best way to survive an apocalypse is to rebuild communities with a wide set of skills, and still dramatically lower our quality-of-life AND HEALTH expectations.
You know, you can charge your house? With a large enough battery and enoug PV power you can operate a heat pump off the grid to control the climate of your home.
The feasibility varies a bit, depending on where exactly you live, but there are definitely useful things you can do with solar power and batteries.
Nothing that a 30W panel can manage though. And I definitely agree to your point about rebuilding communities.
Ehh, disagree. We have a battery backup system (they charge from the electric lines) for our house because we have a well instead of septic lines, so when the power goes out we don’t have water. Our next big purchase will be panels to charge the batteries as further backup.
Interesting. Where do you live?
Around here (Germany), most people get solar power first and THEN buy a battery, when they realize it’s financially more feasible to use as much of the energy the generated themselves instead of using grid power.
Laughing with mp3-player.
And meshtastic or meshcore to communicate
Intriguing. Go on…
There are small devices for off-grid text communication based on radio frequencies. It’s uses LoRa and it requires no Internet after setting up(you may need to download the app). Be aware that Line of sight is a bit factor and that buildings, tress and other stuff might affect it.
You can buy a device or build one on your own (you need to buy first chip and battery) and install/flash mesh on it.
Be careful though, do not get hyped from what you read or see, because in the end might not suit you. Here in Europe it has grown up a lot, lots of people use it, especially when traveling in another country l.
I just gave you a basic explanation, for more information visit the meshtastic community
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtastic
Meshtastic and meshcore websites https://meshtastic.org// https://meshcore.io/
Wow, okay, so this is way better and longer-range than Bluetooth. Cool. Thanks for sharing!
devices with offline knowledge. you can download wikipedia to your device.
also gaming consoles against the boredom and to maybe connect to the neighbor for fun?
Hmm. So let’s talk resilience; lighting, battery power tools, refrigeration, Mobility (mountain eBikes, with solar recharging would make for great post apocalyptic transportation), and many more things.
Depends on tge apocolypse, but Refrigeration… HVAC… Power tools… Could go on.
Maybe even your phone if you’ve downloaded books/manuals/maps needed to rebuild before hand
What is 30 watts going to do for any of those? I don’t think people here know how weak a 30 W panel is.
do you have somewhere to be? if the power goes down long enough, it’s not like you’re going to be in a hurry. but yes 30w is pretty small. you can buy a 450w solar panel for under 200 bucks. add a inverter and 100ah battery and you’re laughing. most shit you can run on dc like lighting and small devices.
The argument was that: “basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights” not that 30 watts is sufficient for long term.
The one statement I replied to gave examples like refrigeration and HVAC that a 30w panel will not run. I made no commentary on what use can be made outside of flashlights.
That being said, as someone who runs 100w panels on my trailer parked on some land, 100w is not much other then topping off a deep cycle battery to then run lights and a propane furnace and fridge. Not that it is not useful at anything, just that those rollup ones are generally used to charge a power bank for phones, lights, and such. One of the better uses I have seen is hooking up one to a car to keep it topped up while sitting. But if you are going to use a panel you need a battery and at that point why not go with a non flexable 100w panel that is about the same size or smaller?
That’s exactly the use case I bought it for. In the picture I’m charging a powerbank. I’m intending to play around with a small-scale solar setup on my shed at some point but for now this is the one cheap investment that enables me to keep critical small electronics running indefinitely.
Check out some auctions, estate sales and such for some deep cycle batteries, solar charge controllers and panels. I have fixed my set up a few times over the years on the super cheap that way. The whole system is not bad other then the batteries for cost.
My strimmer battery charger takes 65w. So 8 hours of 30w to charge a battery is almost 4 hours charging the strimmer battery which would probably fill it’s small battery a few times over. If you are not depleting the strimmer battery multiple times a day, that is more than enough power.
You of course do need a battery to store it so many hours of solar are used in several minute short time loads.
A 30W solar panel is likely going to charge at about 5W, given the inefficiency.
There is some inefficiency in charging a battery but not that much. Main losses would be that the solar panel isn’t actually outputting 30w as you won’t be getting ideal conditions all day.
But it doesn’t necessarily matter either. 65w to charge a battery but you only need it once a week for an hour can easily be managed by 5w all day for a week.
Though planning for an apocalypse is kinda pointless anyway. Preparing for a disaster is more reasonable, such as a storm knocking out power for a while.
I was getting around 12 watts during the sunset when I was testing it. It can probably reach around 20 watts under ideal conditions.
30w can charge a battery bank like a Jackery, and those can put out 1000w continously. It would take ages to charge, but it’s more than nothing.
It might be better than nothing for some things, but providing enough power to run heaters as needed when it’s -20F outside over the next week ain’t going to happen. And while it would work for an LP furnace for a while, that tank WILL go empty, and then where do you get more fuel?
Burning wood seems like the obvious solution to keeping warm in the winter. There’s much better uses for the little solar power there is available then.
Burning wood comes with its own extra work and costs. Plus the danger of burning your house down. I live in a forest, and wood heat is not uncommon here. There were 4 wood heat fires that destroyed homes this past winter, it was a cold and long winter this year. And I did grow up with wood heat as a kid, so I’m very familiar with it. I do remember a couple of chimney fires quite well.
Person I was responding to said nothing that can be charged, not specifically charged by 30 W. People live comfortably off grid these days with panels and batteries to store. Nothing perfect, but the right setup could matter if things went bad
We’re not talking about a whole off grid home here lol. We’re talking about a guy with a 30W solar panel.
You’re moving the goalposts. You said nothing rechargeable besides flashlights isn’t going to be of any use in the apocalypse which is an obviously false statement as demonstrated by the pushback you’re getting. The size of the solar system wasn’t part of the argument you made.
You just get to learn to be VERY patient.
That’s a pretty ignorant thing to say.
Nah, those electric shoe polishers? All eight of them? Why did you get so many of them?
Those I can live without. I can just have people polish my shoes by hand for exchange to letting them charge their devices using my solar panel.
Yeah, light in the dark is totally useless.
I feel like you must have stopped reading my comment half way through to say that……
It wasn’t worth finishing.