Thread: Solar charges for devices

I got my missus a battery pack thing from Repco. She has an iPad, a Kindle touch, and her i5 and is hopeless at keeping them charged so I got her this to juice up on the run.

It was the middle option of the 3 avail and works really well. It has 2 usb ports, one at 1.2amp and one at 3.1, so as to charge a phone on the baby one and her ipad on the grunty one. The lesser battery pack option only had the one port, and the big daddy pack had three. The one I ended up getting her does 3-4 full charges depending on how dead flat the phone was to begin with, the lesser one was rated at roughly 2/3rd of this, and the big one was double.

It dumps charge into the phone just as fast as a wall socket does, so a 45 minute nap would take my i5 from 25% battery to 80% at least I'd say. If you have your phone on airplane mode and take that off a couple times a day, turn it off at night - it'd last a day and a half -ish, times three charges, so you could probably eke out close to a week with this particular model.

It's about 3 inches square and half an inch thick. Weighs a tad more than a pack of cigarettes. Will get some proper details tonight.

If you went back to the same area often enough I wonder if you could possibly take a mid-sized deep cycle battery in with you (on a heli trip so you don't have to carry the bastard) with a length of cable and a solar panel.. Position the panel somewhere on a big rock, epoxy it in place so it doesn't blow off, stash the battery in a plastic box next to it to keep it dry etc. Connect it up and it can be fully charged, waiting for you to pop past and top up portable battery pack and torch batteries or whatever.