Equipt's choice for portable solar - Overland Solar

Video Transcript

Intro

Hi, I'm Paul with Equipt Expedition Outfitters, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about what we believe is the best solar solution for your Overlanding vehicle. We have done a lot of testing and have a lot of experience with different solar solutions out there on the market, and we have settled in on a company called Overland Solar. The reason why I like Overland Solar, well, there's a bunch of reasons. One, the people that run it are awesome. They know their stuff, they know what they're doing, and they do a great job at it. The quality of the product that they put together, and it's made here in the United States, and I like that a lot too.

What Solar Do You Need

What I want to show you is some of their products, but first of all, I want to talk a little bit about what solar do you need. How much solar do you need? Does it make sense for what you're doing? Questions come into play there. It's not just an automatic answer you need solar. Well, no, it's not really that necessary. What I found in my travels is that I travel a lot. I drive somewhere, I stay for a little bit, I get up in the morning, and I drive on. I haven't had many chances to use solar because my batteries have always been in a charged state when I'm on the travel like that. There are other applications where I'm staying somewhere for a few days, and it's typically after the second night in a location that I start looking for solar as a solution to just top off the batteries that we have in the vehicles. And so that's why I always carry with me one of these Overland Solar Bug Out 130s.

What I have found in my experience over time is that the fridges that we love to run, regardless of brand, consume energy. They're the biggest consumer in our vehicles. I've found that if I have a good solar panel, not the cheap stuff, but a very high-quality solar panel of between 80 and 100 watts or perhaps more, that that will offset a fridge in my vehicle and will also top off the batteries while the fridge is not running so that overnight the fridge can continue to do its job off of the auxiliary battery system. So anything above that 80 to 100 watts, you're in great shape. That's just for one fridge in your vehicle. If you've got a lot of other power consumption going on in your vehicle, maybe it needs to adjust that. But if honestly all you're running on the big things in your vehicle are a fridge and a couple of little outlets for USB charging style stuff, maybe a few LED lights, boy, 100 watts of solar is going to be plenty sufficient to offset the consumption in your vehicle.

Now, that's going to change if you put your fridge into freezer mode. Your fridge is going to run a lot more, and that's going to cause a lot more consumption. Maybe you need to up your game a little bit there, but for most folks that are going to be running a fridge in their truck, 80 to 100 watts is going to be plenty of power. And that's why I like this unit here.

Portable Solar

The Overland Solar Bug Out 130. Now, if you look at it, it's not bad. It's about seven pounds, about a foot and a half long by eight inches by three inches. And what it offers inside is a solar panel folded into panels that you can lay out. Now, what I do on mine is I lay this out on either the windshield of the vehicle or sometimes if I have my awning out, I'll throw it up on the awning, and then I run cables to my battery system.

Now, what comes with this solar panel is a connector to the panel. This one here has the SAE connector. The latest ones have a mini Anderson or power pole connection, and the base unit comes with the 20-foot cord. Now, this cord is designed to plug into the panel and then go to whatever you want. And what they put on this cable right now is what they call an Anderson SB50 connector. It's a very common connector, it's used in a lot of different applications. This application we have the black one. Now, the black one is unique. The black one will connect to both the gray Anderson coupler and the red Anderson coupler, something to keep in mind.

So this is what the standard pack is. If you decide to go with what they call the solar controller bundle, that is a little bit of an upgrade, and I think it's a really good idea and very cost-effective. That way, what the bundle does is it has the cable, but it also has a 10 amp MPPT solar controller. And what you would do from here is you would plug the cable, the SP goes into the input, and off of that is a mini power pole that connects to a set of alligator clips to clip onto your battery. This becomes a very portable, very usable system that you can use in your vehicle, or if your friend doesn't have one, you can take it over and use it on his vehicle simply by adding the alligator clips on there. Now, I think that's a really good solution for what it is.

I want to stop for a second and talk about these guys. So a solar panel absorbs energy from sunlight and transforms that into a DC current. The DC current that it comes out with is too high to hook to a battery directly. It'll fry the battery, not a good plan. So they have MPPT solar controllers that control the power, changing that power down to a voltage that is suitable for charging a battery. In boost mode, it's a little over 14 volts. In charge mode, it's a little under 14 volts, and that's the proper charging for a battery. So this is a very, very important piece of equipment to have in line between your solar panel and your batteries, whatever that inline condition might be.

What I do on my vehicle, I drive a Toyota Land Cruiser 200 series. What I have done is under the hood, I have installed hardwire cable for my auxiliary battery to an SAE panel mount port on the vehicle. Now, what I can do is I can take this panel, lay it out, plug the cord into it, into the solar controller, and off of the solar controller, I have an SAE male plug. I plug that into the port that I have on my truck, and I'm good. What I also use this for, and why I really like this, is because I have multiple applications. We have different trucks and trailers in our fleet that we use this on, and I can take this to any one of those applications that I have, whether it be a trailer, a camper, another SUV style vehicle, whatever it might be, and I can utilize this across multiple vehicles. It works out really well that direction, especially with the alligator clips as a portable option.

Okay, so that's the panel that I suggest using. Now, Overland Solar has another panel that I think you might be interested in, and this panel here is what they're calling the Overlander 160 watt panel. They call this a semi-flexible panel because it is kind of semi-flexible. This is 160 watts. This one here is used primarily for permanent mount applications. If you wanted to mount this on the roof of a sprinter van or a trailer or on top of a rooftop tent or whatever that application might be, you could mount this directly down to that application.

Now, one thing to keep in mind, the controls are on the bottom. They make them with controls on top and controls on bottom. If you're going to flat apply this, you want to have the controls on top so that you're not having that cable in place where you want to lay it flat. But this is the step up from the 130. It's another 30 watts of application, and you need to control that correctly with a solar controller as well. A 15 amp controller would be just fine for this unit. These are also units that you can put in parallel and increase your coverage as well if necessary, depending on your application and how much power you need.

Now, the other thing that I like about what Overland Solar has done is they have come up with a myriad of adapters and cords and accessories for you in whatever your application might be. So they have adapters for from the SB50 to an SAE, and they have another one here that is an SB50 to a mini power pole, and they have another one that goes from SAE to simple battery tie-down ports. You can also get extension cables, SAE to SAE, as well as mini SB50 to mini SB50. And between the different components here, you can set this up to whatever your application might be in your vehicle. There's a lot of different ways to go about that side of things, whether it's an auxiliary battery system or a solar generator or whatever those applications might be. Between the different things that Overland Solar has here, you should be able to connect to most of the applications out there.

I hope this has helped a little bit on what we think is the best way to go about it. If you have any questions, please let us know. We'll do our best to help out. I'm Paul with Equipt. Thank you.