I’m only half kidding. I’m a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.
Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn’t much but it’s a start.
Anything you can’t build and repair when it breaks is worthless for a long term situation. Unless long term means a week or so and then civilization returns, like after a bad storm. Hand, water, and gravity powered energy storage are not pretty or as much energy, but they’ll keep going long after panels break or wear out. Then there’s how to store the power, batteries are a lot more complicated if you want something that you can redo or make vs. scavenging. Again, it’s the line between even a bad outage with eventual resolution or complete loss.
Lead-acid battery cells can be replaced pretty easily. The hardest part is sourcing the acid. But, if you can find that, replacing the cells can be done in your garage with basic tools and PPE.
Photovoltaic cells can be replaced easily with a soldering iron and most panels are designed to tolerate a certain percentage of the cells failing. Building new cells might be a challenge, but maintaining the ones you already have is trivial, assuming you can source parts for them.
It may not be perfect or indefinite, but it will certainly get you by for a while, very likely long enough to figure out a longer-term solution.
Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”.
I’m not a prepper by any means but I feel like anything that uses electricity is also beyond my ability to repair, so I feel like a solar panel isn’t the worst thing to have.
He said it was for a long-term power outage, not the literal apocalypse.
But even in the case of the literal apocalypse, with the grid permanently down, solar panels can last decades. I see no reason not to have something like this.