Go Power Portable Solar System with Digital Solar Controller Review
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Review of the Go Power Portable Solar System with Digital Solar Controller
Jake: Hey, guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today, we're going to be taking a look at the line of Go Power portable solar panels. Here we have the three sizes available. You're going to have a 90 watt, a 130 watt, and a 200 watt. It's all going to depend on what kind of energy you're going to need to recharge your batteries.When you have a system on your roof, it stays there. It's tied into your camper's batteries, and it's designed to recharge your camper's batteries.
With portable solar, you can park your camper in the shade and still move your solar panels with the sun. As you can see here, we have our three solar panels that we have available sitting in the shade, but we can move them with the 12 foot extension cord out into the sun in order to harness that energy.Now, the only difference between our three solar panel kits that we have here is going to be the charge rate. Obviously, the size is going to be a bit different, but with that comes a higher charge rate as you go up in line. So with our 90 watt, you're going to get 4.4 amp hours of charge. With our middle, 130, you're going to get 6.7 amp hours of charge, and with our big one on the right, we're going to have 11.4 amp hours.
So this is all going to depend on what kind of energy you plan on using on the inside of your camper. In my personal opinion, these are going to be a great asset for you to have to be able to charge your batteries during the day so that you can use your lights, and your microwave, and your water pump at night.Now just keep in mind, those charge rates are going to be for optimal sunny days. You can see it's a little overcast. Our panels are still going to work well to charge our batteries. They're just not going to work as well as they would in optimal sunlight.
I'm going to go ahead and get our panels setup. Here we have a camper that has solar prep, and in my personal opinion, this is going to be as easy as plugging in our solar panel and then letting it do its job.So if you have either a SAE or an XLR style solar prep on your camper, this is going to be a great option for you. This is going to be our SAE cord adapter and our XLR plug adapter. Now, if you don't have one of those systems, they've still got you taken care of. We have our battery clamps, so you can just clamp it directly onto the terminals of your battery.Or if you'd like a more permanent installation so that all you have to do is just plug it in to your solar panel, they do include a plug with ring terminals.
Now just keep in mind, this kit is rated for only 12 volt systems. They also include a 12 foot extension to be able to get that solar panel out into the sun to harness the energy. And if that 12 foot cable is not enough, we do have a 30 foot extension available here at etrailer.Now in order to get ours setup, we're going to take our SAE plug, plug it in, and then take our extension, plug it in, and then run our extension over to our solar panel. So when you plug your power into your solar panel, you should see the screen light up like we have here, and you'll get a reading. So here on our screen, you can see that we have AGM. That's the type of batteries we're using now. This is also going to work for gel batteries, flooded batteries, and lithium batteries.So you can see it's going to give us a reading of 13.5 volts coming from our batteries. This is going to tell us if our batteries are significantly lower than they should be. It'll tell us if they're low. We'll go ahead and click our select button. See that we have 1.6 amps going from the sun, into our solar panel, to our batteries. I'll click on it again, and we'll get our battery percentage. So we're at 90%, and we can see if we push it one more time, our amp hours currently read zero, but we've only had our solar panel plugged in for about 15 minutes. So after that one hour mark, we should be able to see how many average amp hours that our solar panel is charging our batteries.Now the thing that I like most about this solar controller is that it's not only going to supply your batteries with safe energy. So if you we're to put solar power straight into your batteries, you would potentially overcharge your batteries and damage them. This controller is going to make sure that your batteries are only getting what they need.It's going to have four different modes that are going to automatically kick in as your battery is charging. The first is going to be your both mode. This is going to be a majority of your charge, all the way up until 80%. Once 80% is hit, then you're going to go into absorption mode which this is going to charge between 80% and 90% at a slower rate. Then you'll go into float mode which is over 90%. This is going to float it between 90% and a 100% to make sure that you're going to maintain that charge.Now on flooded batteries, you're going to be using a equalization mode. It's mainly going to be used for storage. It's going to maintain your batteries to eliminate the sulfate buildup to extend the life of your batteries. And on the back of our control panel, you are going to have a USB port for any of those smaller portable devices that you may need to charge. It is going to come with a cover over it. I do recommend keeping that cover on it. In case you do get some inclement weather, you're not going to get any water inside that.Another thing I really like about this kit is it's going to be extremely versatile. You don't have to use it for your camper if you're not going camping. It is going to be a great battery maintainer when you park your camper at home. It's going to keep those batteries maintained on your camper for whenever you go on your next trip. You're going to be able to use this on any 12 volt battery, so if you have a battery on your tractor, or on your four wheeler, anything like that, as long as it's a 12 volt battery, you're going to be able to use these other connections to maintain those batteries also.All three of our kits are going to have panels with a monocrystalline design which is going to be much better than its competitor, the polycrystalline design. The monocrystalline design is going to have a much faster absorption rate which means you're going to be able to charge your batteries faster. The complete outside construction of these solar panels are going to have a aluminum construction, so they're going to last for many, many years down the road. Now when it comes to maintenance for your panels, you do want to make sure that you clean the fronts of your panels if they start to accumulate dirt because that will affect the amount of sunlight they can absorb.Your kit, no matter what size, is going to come with a portable case to be able to carry those solar panels safely and secure inside of your RV or your tow vehicle. What I like about these cases is they're going to have a soft design on the inside so that they're not going to scratch your solar panels, and they're still going to be fairly rigid so that they protect them also. Once you're all done for the weekend, you just simply pack it up in the convenient carrying case and store it away. With all that being said, that's going to do it for our look at the line of Go Power portable solar kits.
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Test Fit:
Andrew K
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Jeff D
Installed by:
Jacob H
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Jacob T
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Dustin K
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Shane H
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