Hey y'all

I'm not too savvy with electronics, much less solar panels and batteries. Here's my scenario. I have this 200W power bank from FlashFish, second link at the bottom, very nice little product. I want to be able to charge it off of a solar panel mounted to my rack. The company only offers those portable ones, and that's just not the route i wanna go. So I got this 28 Watt Mono 18V panel, its the first link at the bottom. My dumbass thought I could just run the same 14AWG wire down to a DC connector and it would work, not surprisingly it didn't. So I need some help getting power to run from the solar panel to a DC connector to be plugged into the power bank. Any help or advice would be appreciated, like I said, electronics aren't my strongest field. Thank you!

Amazon.com : 28 Watt Mono 18V Solar Panel 20W 25W 30W RV Van Solar Car Battery Charger Portable Solar Panel Trickle Charger 12 Volt Batteries Motorcycle RV Boat Marine UTV, ATV, Solar Generator (Zamp Solar) : Garden & Outdoor

Amazon.com : 200W Portable Power Station, FlashFish 40800mAh Solar Generator with 110V AC Outlet/2 DC Ports/3 USB Ports, Backup Battery Pack Power Supply for CPAP Outdoor Advanture Load Trip Camping Emergency. : Garden & Outdoor

I was interested in the solar panel you linked to so I looked at the comments on the product. I noticed that a couple of people just connected the supplied wires to a round dc plug to connect to the device they wanted to charge and it worked. Sounds like what you tried. However, I also noticed that a few people said the solar panel did not produce current and was defective.

Maybe you did nothing wrong and it is the panel that is not working. If you have a multi-meter you could put your panel in the sun and check for function by connecting your multi-meter to the bare wires from the panel to check for current output. Just a thought.

Interesting, definitely will try that out tomorrow. Thanks!

A few things.

All basic solar panel (an array of solar cells) like yours just provides voltage and current. Wire them in series for more voltage and in parallel for more current. Just like batteries.

A 12V solar panels typically have an open voltage of ~20V DC (18V is close enough). Meaning open circuit with no current draw. So if you test it with a volt meter with nothing connected you should see ~15-20V.

Once you put a load (FlashFish) on there, the voltage will droop to something much less. You need to be at about 13.5V to charge a 12V lead acid battery. The charge controller should take care of that and I would assume the FlashFish has a charge controller in there it should be able to connect it directly.

I would

1. Check the polarity (+/-) of your connector. There is no standard and it could be positive or negative polartiy .
   The polarity of the plug should be in the documentation that came with the FlashFish. If it's not in there contact them and ask them.
2. Make sure the the Solar panel is perpendicular to the sun with sufficient sunlight.
3. Check the voltage at the panel. It should be 15-20V with no load and about 13.5-14V when plugged in.

It will take forever to charge with that solar panel. FlashFish shows the input as 15V @ 2.5A. This is vague, is that min/nominal/max rating? Not that you need to answer. Lets assume it's max 15V max input and it will draw a max of 2.5A? So if you are providing 1.5A max and they say it's 7-12 hrs (assuming 2.5A) it could be 20 hrs or more to fully charge it from the solar panel.

If you have doubts, I would ask FlashFish how to connect the solar panel.

So what I had done before was I took the cables running from the solar panel, wired them to a 14AWG wire extension and then connected that to the DC cord, which is also 14AWG. That didnt work. But today I hooked the cables from the solar panel directly to the DC connector and it worked. Can't figure out why the first attempt didnt work, they were the same wire only extended