- Ben from Snowys here folks on a beautiful sunny day
at Brownhill Creek Tourist Park.
Someone once told me to buy once buy right
when it comes to solar and I'm glad I did.
These are my Hard Korr 200 watt portable solar panels
with Crocskin armour here.
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These guys can be charged up when I'm
in a camp site for as long as I want.
They're super powerful, super tough.
And they're easy to set up.
This is how the solar panel looks
when you pull it out of the box.
It comes in this zippered bag here,
where it measures about 71 centimetres
or round about 70 centimetres in width,
about 53 centimetres in height.
And the panels themselves are about four
to five centimetres thick in here,
but got to add a bit of extra height to the pack size
when you include all the cables and things
that are in the front here.
I'll show you what comes inside first
and this is a nice durable bag here,
and you do also get a shoulder carry strap here
and there's straps on the side that I've removed from mine.
This is my own personal panel.
So you can use shoulder straps on it.
It weighs about 11 kilos with everything included,
all the cables and everything included,
but this is the panel itself, so it's a folding panel.
They're four panels there and that folds out.
We'll show you more on that shortly.
There's nothing else inside the main pocket,
but in the Velcro pocket on the front here,
you get a few extra bits.
So I've got an instruction manual,
which tells you mostly about the solar controller itself.
1.5 metre Anderson plug to battery clip lead there.
So you can attach it direct to a battery
if you don't have any other attachment options.
A five metre cable with Anderson terminations on the ends.
Your power controller or your solar controller,
I'll go into more details on that shortly.
And you do also get just a little bag of very basic pegs,
because there are some peg points in the corners here
that I'll show you shortly, so you can peg it down
if you're leaving it out in bad weather.
I'm gonna put the battery clips
into Anderson lead cable away today
'cause I'm not gonna need that.
And I wanna talk a little bit
on the solar controller here.
Now this is a 15 amp 12 volt solar controller.
It caters for a range of batteries
from lithium, AGM, irregular, flooded lead acid,
about seven different types of batteries
this will cater for and it's a five stage charger.
It's got a lot of smart electronics in it,
including a polarity protection, short circuit protection,
reverse current and an overcharge protection feature
in there as well.
So it's a really smart unit.
It's got a back-lit screen on there,
which we'll show you shortly,
probably be able to see in the light, but it is back lit.
And it's got quite a few features on the front,
including a charge indicator here of where the battery's at
and also other indicators on here,
which we'll show you shortly when we plug it in.
And just moving on to the solar panels themselves.
They've got, I'll set this up shortly,
but they've got these little kickstands here
so that you can set it up on an angle,
it maximises the efficiency the sun heating it.
And it folds out to over two metres in length total,
once all these four panels are folded out
and it has this Crocskin armour over the top here
that is suitable to be left out in the weather.
It will put up with rain and hail and that sort of thing.
But obviously if you're leaving it out at night,
you're not getting any solar out of it anyway.
So it might be worth bringing it inside,
but it's designed to be durable.
Now there certified A-grade monocrystalline cells
in here, they're made to a really good quality,
there's really careful wiring,
it's a solid copper backing with 20 points of contact
and they offer a really good warranty on these cells here.
So they're made to a really high standard.
Now they measured the cells at around about 20% efficiency
and the panel offers 200 watts of power
with an 18 volt maximum working voltage
and about 11.1 amps maximum output.
So that's in perfect conditions
without dust or anything on here.
The sun in a perfect position and the panel angled
in a perfect position as well.
An open circuit, so without anything like this attached
to the cables, has got about 21 or has 22 volts
open circuit voltage, so once again,
don't attach it directly to your battery.
It's also made with bypass diodes.
So if you do get a bit of a shade on part of these panels,
the rest of them still work.
A bit of shade doesn't cut the entire panel out.
So it's made to a really high standard
and on top of that, it's all put together
with a really heavy duty 1680 Denier material
on the outside here and there's a bit of padding
in there as well.
So it's put together to be really tough.
So it can be used in the harsh outback conditions.
Now I'll get on to setting it up,
we'll leave the panel folded up while we attach everything
'cause as soon as we open it up,
it's gonna start generating electricity.
So as we plug it in, power is coming out of the cable.
So leave it closed like that
and just fold this first panel open
so we've got the Anderson cable accessible here.
Now to this point here,
we're gonna attach one end of our five metre cable.
Now you could attach the solar controller
at this end here if you like,
I like to attach it at the battery end
so I can be at the same end of the battery,
it also stays under the shelter of the bonnet.
So this will attach on here like so.
Now the other end of the cable here,
we'll just flatten it out,
is going to attach to our solar controller
and if we have a look on the bottom here,
we've got a little pictures.
There's a little picture of a solar panel.
So our solar panel, which is this cable here
is gonna attach here
to this cable and then our battery,
which is this logo here, is gonna attach to this one.
There is also a feature to attach
a temperature controller here,
not something we usually touch on or use
with these solar panels here, but if you are into
all the techie stuff with solar,
you can use that feature there.
So what I need to do here now, is attach the solar panel
to the solar controller here.
If I open this to allow the sun here we can see
it goes through a start-up process.
So it shows that's,
it goes through a process of showing
the software version and then it goes through
an amps and volts test.
And then there's this, I don't know what that means,
but B03 and BLU, which is just a message
saying nothing is happening.
So I'm gonna leave that closed now.
And what I'm gonna do is bring this up
to my battery in the car up here.
So we come up under the bonnet of the car here
and I'll just rest this where you can see it.
Tuck the cable in, so it doesn't fall down anywhere.
Now I'm gonna grab the loose end of the cable here.
Now I've got my battery attached to a Anderson cable here,
so it's nice and easy for me
to attach my auxiliary battery.
This is a flooded lead acid battery.
So if I plug this in, we'll immediately see the display
on the controller here light up.
It's gonna go through the startup process software version,
volts, amps, and then it's gonna show
the amount of volts that's in the battery
but also shows charge state at the top here
and there's also a little indicator here
to show charge state as well.
So at the moment there is three blue lights
and a green light showing that the battery
is actually charged.
You might find this one here flashes sometimes.
If you have a look at the user manual,
it'll tell you what it means
when the combination of these lights is flashing,
but usually if that's flashing now,
it just means that solar is weak,
which we would expect because we haven't actually
got the solar panel open at the moment.
If we press the battery type button here,
a hold down on this for three seconds,
we can actually change what type of battery
we've got this connected to.
So at the moment we can see that say wet.
If I hold down on battery type for three seconds,
the whole unit will start to flash.
And if I keep pressing it again on the bottom here,
it will scroll through calcium, lithium ion, LiFePO4,
LTO, gel, AGM and then I press again
to get the wet battery now I just run lead acid
in my car so that's what I need to leave it on,
let it flash for a while, and it goes back
to the voltage in the battery.
If I press the amps volts button here
it's gonna flick over to amp powers it's showing
that there's no amp powers generated into the battery,
obviously because we haven't had the solar open.
So I flick it back to volts and what we now wanna do
is come back to the solar panel
and set that up over here.
Now I've got the sun, not quite overhead here
is just up at, that's at a probably
a 70 degree angle up in front of me there.
It's about a 25 degree day,
about three o'clock in the afternoon.
There's no clouds in the sky,
so we should get reasonably good efficiency
from the panel today.
So I've put the cable aside and if we just come behind
and as we go, pull these kickstands out
and just rest each panel, as we're doing now.
Soon as I open this panel, it's gonna start
to generate power into the battery.
So I fold this open, I've got that facing
towards the sun there, as I go I pull out
the next kickstand, lean that down,
go over to the next one, pull out the kick stand again.
And the last one, now as I mentioned,
we have got some peg points here if we like.
There's eyelets in these corners here that we can
use to actually attach it or hang it if we like.
We've also got peg points in the kickstand here.
So we could put a peg in that, while it's down
on the ground here, to keep it secured to the ground.
Four of those in the back there
is gonna keep that pretty secure.
Now I probably got that not quite on the best angle there,
if I just spin it around so it's facing the sun exactly.
Could put it flat if you like.
You'll notice a lot of difference
between having it on an angle to having it flat.
Solar panels are very finicky,
given they're only 20% efficient.
That little bit of an angle between where the sun is
and where the solar panel's facing
can make a lot of difference to the input.
Let's duck back over to the solar controller
and see how much power's going to the battery.
We've just come across to our solar panel here,
solar controller sorry.
We're just talking about the lights here at the moment.
So we see the orange light is indicating
that solar's attached, blue light here next
to the lightning bolt is indicating that it's charging.
And this is showing a state of charge across the top
and I find this goes up and down a little bit,
depending on the output of the actual charger here,
but it's a pretty good indication,
particularly when it's unplugged,
of just what the state of charge the battery is.
Back up to the top here, there's a state
of charge across the top here which should line up
with the lights at the bottom there.
Solar panel there showing the solar's connected
and then we've got our actual amount there
the power that's going in, indicated here.
Now the user manual shows a lot of different variations
of how these lights come together so consult
the user manual to understand just what's going on.
But from here we can see we've got 14.2 volts going in.
If we click the amps and volts button here,
it's going to flick over to amps.
So that's showing 9.2, 9.3 amps in there at the moment.
And if we flick it across again,
this has been connected for about five minutes
and we've had about an amp hour of power going
into the battery and that's on 1.1.
So that's showing cumulative amps
that have been powering into the battery.
A lot of people might sorta think,
oh, but it's capable of 11 amps,
why am I not getting 11 amps?
Now, solar as I mentioned before,
being only 20% efficient for these particular ones here,
sometimes less for cheapest solar panels,
you don't always get the maximum power out of it.
And I wanna kinda demonstrate that to you
by showing that we're getting 9.3 amps
out of this at the moment with the solar panels on an angle.
I'm gonna go and lay them flat
and we'll take an amp measurement again,
to see how that changes.
And just before I do that, I just wanna mention
that we're trying to work out how much solar you need
to keep a battery like this charged.
It's not an exact science.
We've got a really good article
that we'll leave the link to in the comments below
or in the description below that you can click on
to understand it, but to summarise
a 200 watt solar panel like this
with a hundred amp power battery like this,
is more than enough to keep a fridge
and some lights going day after day
provided you get a nice clear day every day.
You can stretch that out even further,
if you want to get into all the details of it all
so have a read of the article,
and you'll understand it there.
Let's lie the solar panel flat,
see how the amperage changes.
So we come back here,
we're now getting 7.9 to eight amps.
So just from angling that from there
so the 30 degree angle down flat on the ground,
we've lost one to one and a half amps potentially
of power out of the solar panels.
So we can see just by taking this solar mat
from sitting on an angle like this
to sitting flat like this in the same position,
we've lost that much power.
So how you position your solar panel
is gonna have a big impact on how much power
you can get into your battery.
And the quality of the solar panel
is gonna make a lot of difference there too.
Hard Korr use high quality materials.
And on top of that, they've got their Crocskin armour
that gives an extended lifespan
and it's why they offer really good warranties
on their solar panels as well.
That is the Hard Korr 200 watt
portable solar panels with Crocskin armour.
This is my personal panel here.
I love it, it keeps me charged up
so I can just sit stationary wherever I want
in the outback for day after day.
You can check these out online at snowys.com.au
where you'll find them at our lowest prices, every day.
And if you've got any questions,
let us know down in the comments below,
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