Solar powered battery chargers are now cheaply available for anyone to purchase, on the internet or elsewhere. They have many obvious benefits, and because they are charging up batteries which can be used on other appliances, they are being used indirectly to provide power wherever you need it. We’re going to take a quick look here at some of the uses you can put them to, and the chief advantages of a solar battery charger as opposed to mains electricity.
Green- when a solar battery charger is getting energy, it’s using the sun’s energy, which would have been produced anyway, as opposed to mains electricity, where the current is being generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, with all the associations of consumption of resources and attendant carbon emissions. It can take a while before this balances out, however- it takes energy to create a solar battery charger in the first place, so you’ll need to get a few years’ use out of them before you’re in credit, so to speak. This isn’t generally a problem, however- chargers don’t really have any moving parts and as a result they don’t wear out all that quickly. Barring accidents, if you have a charger you have it for life.
It’s also a highly efficient way to get hold of and keep the energy. As the sun’s light is constant (weather permitting) in the hours of daylight, a small charge is always being generated by the photovoltaic cell. What it you don’t need the power at the time, though? If you’re charging up batteries, then you’re achieving both capture and storage- at the end of the process, you have a charged battery which can be used anywhere, in any compatible device you want. You can now now solar battery chargers where you put depleted ones in at the top and take charged ones out at the bottom, so there is never a point at which you aren’t making the most of the current your solar charger is generating.
Another major factor is independence. As long as you have access to sunlight, you can take your solar powered battery charger anywhere, and use it where there is no access to mains power. In a lot of cases, those are the situations when you need it most. If you’re out camping, or on fieldwork that takes you away from population centres, the last thing you want is to run out of power, and find yourself unable to use the appliances you have with you.
Apart from the inconvenience of going back to civilisation to get fresh batteries, it’s also worth considering that you are often dependent upon the technology you bring with you into the wild. If that stops working, there’s never going to be a convenient time to find out. Take a solar powered battery charger with you, and you’ve got a lightweight solution to this problem.
