#inice

This post is 2500 words long. Therefore, here’s a preemptive TL;DR so you still experience how cool these solar panels are:

I now own 4 portable solar panels and 2 power banks

Total investment of $320

They store 93.6 Amp hours of energy, which is enough to charge my Galaxy S7 phone for an entire month without sunlight.

You can take these things friggin anywhere, literally.

Hiking, golfing, swimming at the beach, driving, eating at a restaurant, ANYWHERE.

Charge phone at same rate as a wall outlet

If I charge my phone once per day, it will take me more 400 years to pay this off

I need to continue to integrate more devices and appliances to make this investment worth it

I have too much energy and can’t use it quickly enough

Best approach at the moment is to share as much energy per day with as many people as possible

Future outlook: connect laptop, lamps, and smaller appliances in apartment

Despite current financial flaws, it’s just insanely cool and convenient

Free and infinite energy no matter where you go

I am now extremely conscious about how much power I waste doing mindless things on my phone

Alright, there’s your TL;DR. Now let’s get to this.

PART 1: THE TECHNICAL STUFF

May 31, 2017, was the last time I plugged my phone into a wall outlet. That night, my first portable solar panel arrived, and my phone has been disconnected from the grid ever since.

As of my writing this on July 1, I’ve grown my solar production and storage to four panels and two power banks, and I haven’t felt worried about charging my phone at all (anymore). I’m someone who always promotes and advocates for solar energy, but until recently, I never used solar for myself. There came a point when I needed to take my advocacy a step further. As they say, if you’re going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. My mission is to show people the power of solar, and what better way to do that than to get some portable panels and show them off?

Such as in a restaurant after a day of golf...

Or, quite literally, while golfing...

My first purchase was one portable solar panel, for just about $50. I purchased it from a company called iNiCE, which, I’ve found, was probably the best company to buy these from for one simple reason: this version of the iNiCE solar panels has 10000 mAh (10 Amp hours) of internal energy storage, which is enough to recharge my Samsung Galaxy S7 a little more than three times (it would charge the iPhone 7 four to five times). This means that with the panel’s 2.4 Amp, 5 Volt output, it takes my phone about 1.2 hours to recharge from empty, which is the same as the wall plug in your house.

For some technical clarity, storage capacity is defined in terms of how long it takes a battery to recharge at 1 Amp/hour. A 10 Amp hours battery (10000 mAh), takes 10 hours to recharge. The iNiCE solar panel functions optimally at 2.4 Amps under direct sunlight, so, optimally, it takes 4.1 hours to charge (but efficiency decreases as the panel heats up, so allow time in the shade or find a way to cool the panel if you want to maintain peak performance in one sitting).

Trust me, these things get HOT.

Looking at other products, most competitors don’t have energy storage attached to their panels. This makes iNiCE convenient and reliable, because I can sit my solar panels out in the sun for a few hours and charge their batteries to full capacity. But if you put a competitor’s panel in the sun all day, it won’t store energy without a separate power bank attached.

That’s the other reason iNiCE panels are so convenient: you can charge them, then drain their batteries into a power bank. Granted, you’ll lose some energy in the transfer, but you won’t notice the loss without physically measuring it yourself.

Along with my first solar panel, I purchased a 26800 mAh power bank (26.8 Amp hours) from Anker, for $60. This power bank can charge my phone just about nine times at full capacity.

In the image below, the power banks are the black boxes behind the panels (each bank is 7 in X 3 in).

Alright, all the technical stuff is out of the way. Let’s get to the fun parts, shall we?

PART 2: SOLAR PANELS ARE FUN AND EXCITING

The sheer awesomeness of owning solar panels definitely put me on a high for a few days. I was, and still am, very conscious of putting my panels in the sun when it’s out. There’s just something so beautiful about opening the panels under the sun and seeing your phone screen light up, indicating a charge has begun. I can be out in the middle of my yard, driving down the road, playing golf, even going for a hike, and these work absolutely everywhere. Solar gives you that freedom. I’d even go so far as to say that solar panels should be a priority for anyone who goes long-term hiking and camping. No need to worry about your phone going dead in an emergency, ever.

The image below was taken as I was driving 9 hours to vacation.

It's just exciting. Every morning, when I need to, I wake up and put my solar panels in the sunlight to make use of every photon the day has to give. I eat breakfast, take a shower, go write my book in a coffee shop for a couple hours, come back, and the panel is fully charged. By then, it’s usually only 10 or 11 in the morning! Three full phone charges – more than enough for two days – all in the time it takes me to edit a few pages in my book and drink a few coffees.

Weeks of phone charge, that is.

You may be wondering about range anxiety, a common issue people bring up about electric cars (the general argument is that gas stations are everywhere, electric chargers are not. If you’re running low on charge, will you make it to an EV charger before you lose power?) I will admit, at first I was definitely using more power than I had available. Wasting time on the phone, bright screen, playing music and videos off the phone a lot, etc.

My restriction on power made me self-conscious of how much power I, as an individual, use every single day. And I consider myself to be on the low end of power usage. I know people who watch YouTube for hours. Play mindless games. Text nonstop. Even more power consuming, using Snapchat for most of their communication. Imagine how many full phone charges a day some people require, maybe even yourself!

I started limiting myself on my phone. I set time restrictions, restrictions on things I’d download, how long I’d use my phone for videos and music, how I would communicate with people. This conscious effort not only made me aware of how much energy I waste, but made me think, if I’m somewhere on the low to middle end of the spectrum, how much energy are we wasting when hundreds of millions of people are combined? What if we, the consumers, are responsible for higher costs of energy because it is so convenient to access, because we almost always near a wall outlet (except for the Starbucks I wrote my fourth book in. That place was a power outlet void).

Let me point something out:

Sunlight, if you didn’t notice, IS FREAKING EVERYWHERE.

As a guy trying to use sunlight to generate electrical energy, to prove the concept that solar panels work and are exciting and should be adopted en masse, I’ve already caught myself wishing for cloudy days. No pun intended, but that’s where I think solar power really shines. The fact that I can literally step outside and immediately charge my phone is amazing in itself, but is, in the end, just a cheap trick I started taking for granted in the first week of owning solar panels. The true proof of concept requires you to sustain yourself day after day like that, even on the cloudy ones.

Even in the rainstorms.

Even in the blizzards.

Even in the asteroid apocalypse.

If the sun is always out, there’s nothing to prove. It gets boring. You stop noticing where your energy is coming from. The real excitement--the stuff that gets your blood pumping--comes when the sun isn’t shining. Are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs? When that first power level light drops down a bar, does your heart start racing, and your mind start thinking, “I need to recharge, NOW.”

Yes, the proof of concept for bringing solar energy to the world’s infrastructure is not in producing energy, but in storing energy. Fast fact: enough sunlight hits the earth every hour to power the world for an entire year. The trick is, do we have the ability to store that energy and use it later? And if we don’t have enough storage, can we use that energy quickly enough, and begin storing even more energy, in a way that is deemed a successful economic investment? Or is it being used simply to show off, to look flashy?

Ooooh, shiny: the only thing missing is some good ol’ Star Trek lens flare.

Above, I said there is simply too much energy for me to use. I’m not lying. As of writing this, I haven’t even touched my power banks in almost three weeks, because every day, I charge my panels when I’m writing, or at work, or literally driving around town. I am always collecting energy, but that doesn’t mean I’m using it. I know I can fill 100% of my storage capacity in less than two days of sunlight (15 hours of peak performance). But I use less than 4% of that energy per day, which means the rest of the energy is just…existing. Nobody is touching it. I would need to connect every phone in my house, every laptop, and every television, just to use most of the energy I can store each day. And the thing is, I can keep upgrading. I can keep adding storage. I know with my current 48 inches by 12 inches of surface area (all four panels combined), I can collect about 200 Amp hours every day. That’s 24 laptop charges, or 66 cell phone charges. I just need more storage to accomplish that.

Finding more ways to use this energy will help me pay off my investment. At the moment, if I charge my phone once a day, it will take me a whopping 400 years to pay off this entire system. You can see the problem. As I said above, I need to use as much energy as possible, as quickly as possible, to make the return on this investment worth it, and chop down that time. Fortunately, I’m conscious about this sobering fact, and when I see family and friends charging from a power outlet or computer, I immediately connect them to my panels. I also leave the panels in the open, with the cords already attached, to encourage them to connect to the panel instead of plugging into the wall. Going even further than that, I’m going to start offering for other people to plug into my panels and power banks in public, rather than outlets. It’s free energy. It’s there for everyone to use. So here, have some, on me!

Down the line, I plan to integrate my laptop, and build up to where I’m running lamps and appliances in my apartment on solar energy. Only then will the investments will pay off in years, even months, not centuries.

PART THREE: ENERGY USAGE AND AN ECONOMY OF SCALE

The typical phone is recharged twice to three times a day. On average, over the course of a year, that adds up to about $2.40 USD added to your electric bill. Not much money, right? And that money is spread out. You don’t charge just at your house. You charge at work. At the airport. At your friend’s house. At a restaurant. You, the individual, might not be paying that $2.40, but it exists collectively, a few cents here, a few cents there. Someone, somewhere, is paying for a portion of the energy that goes into your phone.

Imagine one million average people charging their phones each year. That’s $2,400,000 spent on energy. Now, let’s say they all drastically change their phone habits and charge just once a day. That price becomes a mere $800,000. By limiting their usage, one million people are saving $1,600,000. That’s an extra $1.60 in every person’s pocket, just by reducing the wasteful time we spend our phones. It might not seem like much on a small scale, but imagine that amplified across the world. The savings in just one year would be incredible.

And that’s just from the energy on a phone. Imagine lights. Refrigerators. Air conditioning. Computers. Televisions. The savings from reducing wasteful usage on a large scale would add billions, perhaps trillions, into the world’s economy.

Let me slow down a bit, because I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m sitting here saying that limiting our energy usage will save the world billions of dollars, but I’m supposed to be talking about solar panels. I made an investment. Sure, not using your phone will save you money, but you want to use your phone, obviously. So how does solar let you get your money’s worth?

In the first week of June, I went to the beach and charged my panel every day, letting my family connect, too, so I could drain the power each day and maximize my energy investment.

By the second week of June, I had four solar panels and two identical power banks. Altogether, 93.6 Amp hours of storage, enough to charge my laptop, from empty, 11 times. Altogether, this investment cost me $320. So again, you ask, “Is it worth the money?”

My answer is complicated.

You know what I’ve found? There is simply too much energy to collect, and I don’t have enough storage to collect it, nor do I have enough devices connected to the solar panels and power banks to make good use of all the energy I do have. As of my writing this, three solar panels and both power banks are 100% charged. The fourth panel is 50% charged, because I’ve had my phone hooked up to it all day during and after extensive use. I even had my panel charging in the middle of a restaurant to gain energy when I didn’t need it. 

We take energy for granted. We see a wire that runs into our house, and we know that wire provides us with all the power we can ever hope for. But we never see the substation the energy comes from. We don’t see the coal or gas that gets burned. Energy is simply given to us, with the promise that it will always be there.

What about blackouts, then? When a substation overloads, or a massive storm rampages up the coast, hundreds, thousands, even millions of people can lose power, because suddenly, the single line into their home is no longer receiving energy from the source. Solar energy, and all renewables, I should add, is different because of storage. When you put solar panels on your house, you can also add a box that collects the energy to save surplus energy for later use, and it can be located inside the house, not out in the weather.

What happens when a storm takes out the neighborhood? You won’t lose power. 

What happens when a tree smashes through a power line? You won’t lose power.

What happens when lightning strikes the substation, or a transformer explodes? You won’t lose power.

What happens when ice snaps electric wires? You won’t lose power.

There are still pitfalls—such as cloudy days, or not enough storage capacity—but solar energy, in the long term, is meant to be shared. Energy collected on one side of the world can be transferred elsewhere as needed. Live in Portland, Oregon, or the UK? You could be getting your energy from a location that receives copious amounts of sunlight, too much for that area to use. In fact, there are already entire islands running on solar energy, such as the American Somoa, Haiti, the island of Kauai in Hawai’i, and other small islands. And soon, following massive rolling blackouts, southern Australia will be powered by solar, thanks to an initiative by Tesla and Elon Musk that has led to a worldwide solar energy arms race. It is this kind of competition -- healthy competition that forges an energy revolution -- that is steadily rising as renewable energy takes center stage away from limited fossil fuels.

So there it is, the experience of my first month with portable solar panels. It’s been fun, and I’m looking forward to building up my solar array even more! I will continue to update as I experiment and grow, and hopefully one day my life will be running on free, clean, and infinite solar energy, and all the other renewable sources nature has to provide.

In just one month, these four small panels have begun to transform my life and energy awareness. What else are they capable of?

Do you want your own portable solar panels? I purchased mine HERE

Inice for @runac99 !! Gotta love drawing a watcher every now and then, they’re fun to draw.

Inice for @runac99 !! His Watcher, which is an undead drow or elf in Remyra~

Day 8 without plugging my phone into a wall charger!!

So I made an upgrade to my solar array….I now have three panels and two power banks (I don’t keep them in the sun, just have them there so you can see them better in the pic. They would get suuuuper overheated).

What you see here equates to about 83.6 Amp hours. I have a Samsung Galaxy S7, with a battery capacity of 3 Ah, so this array should supply me with about 27-28 full phone charges. At full storage capacity and responsible phone usage, it could rain every day for almost a month and I’d be fine.

Fortunately, today is a nice, bright sunny day! That means I’m collecting solar energy, and lots of it!