Jump to content
Leica M EV1: Die erste M mit EVF statt Messssucher ×
Leica M EV1: The first M with EVF instead of Rangefinder ×

Solar Power Options For Digital M

Stealth3kpl

By Stealth3kpl
in Leica M (Type 240 / 262)

Recommended Posts

david strachan

david strachan

Posted
Posted

Pete, Leave your devices off, as much as possible.  No chimping.  Carry couple of reliable batteries. Take a film camera instead of the Ricoh.

You are just making a wilderness walk a nightmare worrying about your electronics all the time.

cheers  Dave S

Link to post
Share on other sites
IkarusJohn

IkarusJohn

Posted
Posted

We have used solar chargers for paragliding instruments for years. There are a number of universal solar chargers on the market - you would need to take your charger with you, though. 

 

I used a Solario for a while. I think they have improved over the years. 

Link to post
Share on other sites
Stealth3kpl

Stealth3kpl

Posted
  • Author
Posted

We have used solar chargers for paragliding instruments for years. There are a number of universal solar chargers on the market - you would need to take your charger with you, though. 

 

I used a Solario for a while. I think they have improved over the years. 

I still use a Solario vario :-)

Pete

Link to post
Share on other sites
Stealth3kpl

Stealth3kpl

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Pete, Leave your devices off, as much as possible.  No chimping.  Carry couple of reliable batteries. Take a film camera instead of the Ricoh.

You are just making a wilderness walk a nightmare worrying about your electronics all the time.

cheers  Dave S

I always use film. I'm new to digital and was considering trying it for a trip. I'm interested in peoples experiences with particular solar chargers that you see advertised nowadays. I always imagine them to be rubbish, taking all day to give you little more than you started with.

Pete

Link to post
Share on other sites
marchyman

marchyman

Posted
Posted

Many solar chargers are 5V only assuming you'll only be charging things that use a USB cable.  The Leica M charger requires 12V at 1.3A or about 16 watts.   There will be loss so you'll need a larger unit.   A unit rated at about 25 watts that can deliver 12V should do the job... providing all you want to charge is your M battery and you stop at noon local time to put the panels where they have a good view of the sun and don't move them for 2-3 hours.   Be careful of the small print.  Some of the devices deliver 5V or 18v but can't handle 12v without an external charge controller.

 

A solar rechargeable battery that can be used to charge your other devices might be a better choice, but... the solar aspects are mostly a gimmick.  If you read the specs and do a little math you'll find it would take 100 or more hours of sunlight to recharge the battery if empty.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Peter Kilmister

Peter Kilmister

Posted
Posted

Why would you have a solar charger for your car?

 

And why would you leave your car in the Alps ? :)

 

Apologies.  Three beers and I should probably stay off the computer :)

We owned a chalet (ski lodge) near Val d'Isere. By law, Alpine roads above a certain altitude need a fully equipped vehicle (4x4, special tyres, etc.) in winter.

For a lot less than the price of a Leica M I bought an old Jeep Cherokee. It was all kitted out.

The downside was that it used a lot of electricity to maintain its automatic everything. We used to leave it at Chambery airport when we were in the UK. On return to Chambery the battery was flat. Try starting an automatic vehicle with a flat battery! It was suggested to try a solar panel to trickle charge the battery in our absence. I had the car's electrics modified to allow this and bought a solar panel that lay on top of the dashboard. Tests showed that it just might work.

In reality it was useless. Not enough hours of daylight in winter.

 

That car had a lot of plus points, it would go up and down anything in any conditions. It was quick but couldn't pass a petrol station!

Link to post
Share on other sites
AndrewDD

AndrewDD

Posted
Posted

You'll really have to flog an M to run through the battery in a day. I just came back from 5 days in Spain, took about 400 pictures, and had 90% of the battery left. That's without live view & chimping, but I did sit in coffee shops a few times looking through the photos and never bothered too much about switching the camera off.

Link to post
Share on other sites
bencoyote

bencoyote

Posted
Posted

I've actually done this rather extensively and so I'm not talking hypothetically.

 

For longer backpacking trips I take a:

  • Goal Zero Nomad 20 - solar panel
  • Goal Zero Sherpa 50 - storage battery
  • a custom cables that go from the Sherpa to a manifold that charges two ham radios and the Leica charger. 
  • I've also used a the standard Goal Zero default cigarette plug, and special pass through cigarette plug going to the Leica charger and a Scoche high power USB plug for cases where we had to more phones and no ham radios.

This is sized for quite a few fairly high power devices. We had:

  • The Leica
  • 2 ham radios
  • 2 watch GPSs
  • 2 Cell phones
  • USB charging headlamps
  • a USB charging camera
  • and a tiny speaker

Depending on the length of the trip and the other devices you might to keep charged, you may be able to use drop down to a smaller solar panel. I think that there is a Nomad 15. I don't believe that the Nomad 7 works with the Sherpa 50.

 

Another thing you need to keep in mind is how many hours of day will you be on the move vs. stopped were you can charge up your storage battery. If you are going to be stationary for long periods of time and have something like a base camp, your storage battery can soak up power all day and you feed it to your devices in the evening. If on the other hand you stop for lunch and in the late afternoon but hike all day then you need a higher power solar panel which will grab more Joules in the short time you're stopped.

 

Also keep in mind weather and ratio of sun to overcast. If you are going to a dark overcast place you are not going get as much power as you will in high dry mountains. In my personal experience having a rugged setup is worth it.

 

I also find that it is best to have a good system. Things that are designed to work together. Over the years I've tried several systems that didn't work out and ultimately the problem ended up being some kind of incompatibility. Things like the actual voltage coming out of the solar panel in full sun was too high and shorted out the charging circuit for the storage battery.

 

In my experience cheap things don't last out in the field. Sorry.

 

A measure that I use to sort of know when I've sized my system properly. Is if my storage battery slowly decreases in charge over the course of the trip.

 

VERY IMPORTANT: Test everything extensively before you go!!!! Leave yourself time to change things should you find out that something is not working as you'd hoped.

 

Other options depending on your trip parameters:

  • Just take a fully charged storage battery and forget the solar.
  • Just take fully charged Leica batteries
  • If you have more devices or are supporting more people you might want to consider the Sherpa 100 rather than the Sherpa 50. It is a much better designed device and can even support a laptop if you need it to.
Link to post
Share on other sites
Stealth3kpl

Stealth3kpl

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thanks for your comments everyone. You've confirmed my suspicions that solar may not be as simple as one might imagine. It looks as though an effective system involves some considerable outlay and for most back country trips of 2 weeks, perhaps just precharged spare batteries is a better option in terms of reliability, simplicity, weight and space. Thanks particularly to Bencoyote for pointing me to a system I like the look of and will consider when longer projects are on the horizon.

Pete

Link to post
Share on other sites
flyalf

flyalf

Posted
Posted

Hi, 

 

I have used the Goal Zero 50 adventure kit in the north of Norway and in Russia in 1 weeks trips. This gives 5V, 12V and laptop (19V ?) output. The Leica battery was charged through Leica charger with 12V. This worked ok. The provided solar cell was in short of little use. I left it to charge at tent, and indoors in car. Perhaps this is to far north to give the needed effect?

 

I have since sold this kit and decided to rather have extra M batteries, and to charge from car charger whenever possible.

Link to post
Share on other sites
bencoyote

bencoyote

Posted
Posted

Hi, 

 

I have used the Goal Zero 50 adventure kit in the north of Norway and in Russia in 1 weeks trips. This gives 5V, 12V and laptop (19V ?) output. The Leica battery was charged through Leica charger with 12V. This worked ok. The provided solar cell was in short of little use. I left it to charge at tent, and indoors in car. Perhaps this is to far north to give the needed effect?

 

I have since sold this kit and decided to rather have extra M batteries, and to charge from car charger whenever possible.

 

That includes the Nomad 13 solar panel, when I assembled my last system, the one described above, I did the math and found that it wasn't quite enough which is why I decided to get the Nomad 20 instead.

 

A couple things with solar:

 

I meant to say this in my previous post but evidently I forgot.  You really cannot plug the Leica Charger directly into a solar panel and have it charge.  You really do need a storage battery that is designed to charge of a solar.

 

If you're just going to let it charge all day at camp you need to make sure that the solar cell is in a good place to receive daylight sun.  You also have to locate the battery in a place where it will stay cool and not overheat by being out in the sun. Most lithium ion battery charge circuits monitor battery temperature to make sure that they don't catch on fire.  If you leave the goal zero Sherpa out in the sun the aluminum case gets hot and it will shut off charging up the battery.  That's one of the things that I discovered while testing at home. By just making sure that the Sherpa was in the shade while the solar panel stayed in the sun I was able to avoid that problem.

 

Ideally you want to have your solar cell position such that you have the incident angle of the sunlight perpendicular to the solar cell.  If you're going to just leave it at the camp what you want to do is to orient it towards the south (in the northern hemisphere) at an angle approximately equal to your latitude.  I tend to use sticks or a rock.  Laying it flat is obvious but doesn't give you adequate performance.

 

----

 

This is about my fourth backcountry solar system and it's the one that works the best.  However, I arrived at all of this and all of these tips by just testing and testing for months at home before I left. 

 

PS I've asked Leica to make an accessory charger or the T and probably the SL that either charges off of high power USB the same as an iphone, 12v like the M's charger does, or USB-C. I think the world is ultimately going to go to USB-C for everything small and DC and that would be the future proof but adoption has been surprisingly slow.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Mikeleica

Mikeleica

Posted
Posted

I used a Goal Zero 7W panel with the M240 charger via the car charger plug on a 10 day cross country ski trip in Wyoming last month and it worked great at keeping the two batteries I had with me topped off.

 

I think the main reasons it worked so well is that photovoltaic panels are much more efficient in cold weather, the panel was always in bight sunlight on my pack and if not pointed right at the sun, had exposure from a lot of backscatter off the snow. 

 

YMMV

Link to post
Share on other sites
bencoyote

bencoyote

Posted
Posted

I used a Goal Zero 7W panel with the M240 charger via the car charger plug on a 10 day cross country ski trip in Wyoming last month and it worked great at keeping the two batteries I had with me topped off.

 

I think the main reasons it worked so well is that photovoltaic panels are much more efficient in cold weather, the panel was always in bight sunlight on my pack and if not pointed right at the sun, had exposure from a lot of backscatter off the snow. 

 

YMMV

 

Admittedly I never tried that particular combination but that it is almost exactly where I started when I first tried solar in the back country. That kind of direct to a solar panel usually doesn't work. I'm a little more impressed by the Leica charger. 

 

When you look at the bottom of the Leica charger it is 12v @ 1.3A which is 15.6W and you were using a 7W panel. I know that the 15.6W is peak and lithium batteries slow their charge at the end of their charge cycle and so it won't using 15W all the time but I'm still impressed that it worked at all.

 

Did your batteries ever get really low or did you just top them off?

Link to post
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...