Best 100 Watt Portable Solar Panel

[smilinghermit]

I am about to bicycle tour across America. I am needing help with people's input on which Portable 100 Watt solar panel to charge my 65 Watt, 19.5 Volt Laptop simultaneously with phone and ipad. Thank you to anyone can help me. There's too many choices out there and I need it for survival.

 

[Tomthumb62]

Sunpower flexible if you must have a flexible panel. $160 from sunpoweredyachts.com if you use code RVwithtito.

If you wish for better durability at the cost of slightly more weight, the 200W Renogy folding suitcase is good. I think they might also have a 100W folding suitcase as well. Search for used/refurb on Amazon Warehouse, we saved a big chunk $$ doing so.

I have both brands. The Sunpowers are on the roof of our rig and the Renogy suitcase we setup on the ground when needed.

 

[Mattb4]

I can not give any advice as to what is Best but I can say that many of the portable panels out there have fraudulent watt ratings. Standard conditions for rating solar panels is based on 1000w per square meter (10.76sqft) of area in full sunlight available plus efficiency. If no efficiency is given you can expect that it is at most 22% and more likely less than that. What this means is you need 1 square meter of panel to have 220w of output in full sunlight. So look for the external measurements of any panel you are interested in and do the math.

As example a 100w panel would need to have about .5sqm size or around 5sqft

 

[Tomthumb62]

Just tested my new 100W flexible Sunpower panel in the bright sun, laying flat on the ground. Got 5.6A out of a rated 5.8A.

At the same time, I tested my 2x100w Renogy suitcase and got 8.4A in same conditions. These are rigid panels tilted towards the sun. 4.2A per panel.

Sunpower is currently the best flexible panel you can buy without getting into the $700-1000 per 100W panel stuff used by the military.