I've been thinking about charging 14500 for some of the torches I have by using solar panels. I've seen one uk bloke who sells stuff via cpfmarketplace.
But the Scottish tighwad genes make me wonder if there is a cheaper way to do it either by myself or by purchasing something mass produced. I've looked at some of these ipad/phone chargers and wondered if some of them perhaps used 14500 or 18650 for their power storage. Maplin in the uk have a range of these basic solar chargers for phones and Ipods but seem to use flat phone batteries.
Anyone aware of anything that uses 14500 for its power storage or any other solar chargers that can do 14500 or 18650?
old4570 was attempting something like this, using a Shekor charger. But then he lives in Australia where they get rather more of it than we do. At least in theory, any charger with a 12V input ought to work with a 12V solar panel. You might want to put in a blocking diode just in case the 12V input bypasses the rectifier - which it ought to. Hopefully Matt will chime in.
You mean cottonpickers? He had to order a mass amount of IC's for them-they have the "proper" CC/CV charging algorithim, and can have up to 4 current settings, which is nice for small cells.
Seems like the answer is usually that unless you are just completely off the grid, you are way better off taking more batteries than trying to get a solar charger to work. If you want to get 12V input at a couple of amps that you will need for charging, you will need a pretty substantial solar panel. A lot of these commercial solar chargers are junk and will take many days before they can charge a small battery, let alone an 18650 or 2. Are you going to carry this setup with you (like for camping)? Are you going to be able to leave it out all day and keep it pointed towards the sun? Will the batteries you are trying to charge get cooked in the sun? Then you have to be able to cut off the charge when the battery is full. It just gets kind of impractical.
If you are off the grid the best solution I heard was to hook up a solar panel to a car battery and then charge whatever you want from the car battery (which should work with all kinds of things that use 12V to charge). That's not remotely portable, but if you want portable, then it is probably a lot easier to carry several sets of batteries with you than a solar panel and charger.
Round here, sunlight is somewhat problematic for about 9 months of the year.
I assume you have an inverter so could just use a mains charger. Or a 24V one, the solar/wind systems I've seen here are mostly 24V. Quite a lot of the DX chargers will take 24V DC.
It's getting far more expensive to run solar/wind setups here now as the Royal Navy sold off/scrapped (Sometimes both simultaneously) all the diesel electric submarines - ex-naval submarine batteries were the cheapest way to store power.
If you have a 12V system, I'd get a hobby charger and make up as many leads/holders as required. Handy for charging just about anything else too.