I fell in love with using solar panels for backpacking last year when I used them to power a ~2500 mile section hike of the Continental Divide Trail.

On that hike, my solar panels allowed me to be WAY more self sufficient, and I had what felt like unlimited power.

Figuring out your daily power consumption is pretty easy.

Just find out the capacity of the batteries in your devices and make a rough estimation.

For example, If your phone’s battery is 3000 mAh (which is about average) and you use 50% of your phones battery per day, then your phone’s daily power consumption is 1500 mAh.

⚡ If I had to guess what most people’s power consumption is for hiking, I’d say about 3500 mAh per day, which is a VERY comfortable number.

📵 Yes, you probably should strive to limit the use of your electronics on your backpacking trips (so you can focus on what matters- the trip), BUT, electronics are more useful then they’ve ever been.

📱 Nowadays, phones are so reliable and navigation apps are so good that it’d be silly to not use a phone (or at least a GPS) as your main source of navigation.

📷 Also, going for a long hike without taking photos and/or videos is unprecedented in 2023.

To start off, we need to figure out the amount of power that we can get from the alternative to a solar panel, which is a power bank.

🔋 Generally, we can expect a power bank made by a reputable brand to deliver roughly 65% of it’s rated capacity to the battery of the device that it’s charging.

What that means is if you have a 10,000 mAh power bank, it’ll have just enough power to charge a 6,500 mAh battery.

Of course, a power bank can be significantly more efficient but, due to a bunch of different factors, 65% is the rough real-world efficiency.

🔌 Most of the factors that affect efficiency are out of your control but the 1 factor that you can be easily in control of is the cable that you use with your power bank.

🔌 A short, high quality cable is generally much more efficient than a long cheapo cable.

On average, the weight of a power bank from a reputable brand is about 1200 mAh of rated capacity per ounce.

⚡/⚖️ In effective capacity, (at 65% efficiency) that’s about 780 mAh per ounce.

☀️ To represent solar panels, we’ll be using the Lixada “10 watt” USB panels.

I’m sure that you could build (and probably buy) solar panels that are much lighter BUT, when you take into account cost, accessibility, usability, and durability, the Lixada panels are as far as I know, the best solar panels on the market.

The biggest problem that solar panels have is the fact that their ability to deliver power to your devices varies drastically with different combinations of cables and devices, and with different environmental conditions.

Power banks do also suffer from these variations in efficiency but not nearly as badly.

⚡ In ideal conditions, with a setup that’s functioning properly, you can expect a Lixada panel to deliver an average of about 0.75 amps of current at 5 volts to a battery.

In other words: 750 milliamps.

⚖️ When you cut off the handle of a Lixada Solar Panel, it weighs ~3.22 ounces.

⚡/⚖️ With the above information, we can roughly calculate the mAh/oz of a Lixada Solar Panel using this formula:

If you plug the estimates into the formula, this is what it looks like:

If you’re going on long trips and using large amounts of power, solar panels look like a pretty darn good option… at least on paper.

🤔 Solar panels are significantly less user-friendly because they do not charge your different devices consistently with the same amount of power, they’re an extra thing to tend to and worry about, and their effectiveness is completely dependant on how they’re used and the environment they’re used in.

⌛ But, regardless of the environment you’re in, the longer your trip is, and the more power you consume, the more solar panels will make sense.

⚖️ The weight of power banks can really add up. For certain trips, solar panels may be the only practical option.

⏱️ In addition to weight savings, solar panels can also be a MASSIVE time saver, especially on a thru-hike or something similar.

⏱️ Solar panels completely eliminate the need to charge in “town”. Depending on your situation, that could translate to a lot more time hiking and a lot less time in town. In the case of my Continental Divide Trail hike, my solar panels saved me over 100 hours.

• ⚡ If you want the lightest, most efficient system: Use just 1 solar panel and 1 short cable. Don’t use a power bank.
• 🔌 If you want to increase the current and/or charging speed of your system: Use 2 solar panels with a USB power enhancer.
• ☁️ If you want to boost the flexibility & versatility of your system: Use a power bank with your panel(s) to store excess power and absorb power when you don’t want a device (like your phone) to be plugged in.
• 🎚️ If you’re serious about maximizing efficiency: Buy a USB power meter and mess around with as may different combinations of cables and devices as you can.

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