Solar Vs generators

Hi Honky

Firstly I wouldn't say "one of the most important emergency items to own is a generator". Never. We carry dried rations and a water container that is reserved for an emergency. We also have a satellite phone. A generator isn't an emergency item.

But I suppose it depends on what kind of camping. Some would say the beer getting cold is national disaster.

Anyway all jokes aside;

What is your question and what type of camping do you do?

Phil

Honky,
I have a small EU 20i Honda genset which I mainly use when we lose power has been happening every year. We lost power yesterday around 1.30 in the morning and all I was interested in was stopping the tucker going off. I carried over to 2 of my neighbours and kept their fridges and freezers cold as well.
We also have enough food for over a week in our cyclone pack but that is for dire straits use only.

Solar is good but we all know what happens without sunshine. I do have a small solar setup 160w that will run my trailblaza so a combo of the 2 covers most bases.

Many of the people to the north won't get power back for weeks and with the of high temps nothing will keep for long, maybe we will have to bring back corned meat and the meatsafe.

Have a good one

G'gay Honky, If you wish to view your genny as one of the most important emergency items then fair enough. IMHO for the $$$ involved in solar panels & other situations involved with them like the weather....if it's overcast for a week no sun!!! hmmmm!! I chose to put my hard earned cash into a Honda 2. It is not affected by the weather & powers everything. The Honda is pure sine wave & therefore safe to run every appliance you have plus able to charge your batteries. I use a Projecta 15amp powered by the genny. Solar panels can be very expensive & some do not live up to the sales pitch that sellers (especially overseas compnies) claim. Anyway that's my opinion. I wouldn't leave the Honda home & take solar again that's my opinion.

Hi Honky

We use solar when caravanning, and with a bank of panels, we have more power than we need even in cloudy and wet weather. In the hot tropics, solar and batteries are not as efficient, but not enough of a problem for us to need to supplement with the genny. We are fairly low power users when camping.

At home our Honda 2i genny gets far more use at home during long power failures. We have two fridges and a chest freezer, and rotate them for one hour each until bed time, then the genny goes off until morning. At the same time as a fridge, it will run small items like aquarium pumps, reading light, radio and UHF base, and do it all on eco setting. Communications are important in emergency situations. We have not tried it on the water pumps, as we believe they would be too much for it. If used only at home and needed for the water, a bigger genny would be better, however this is a dual purpose lightweight unit that comes with us but rarely gets used when travelling.


Motherhen

being a novice i am now totally confused !!!! will keep reading with interest tho' !

What are the LED's that light up your back yard? Are the LED floodlights and if so what rating are they?

Phillips are marketing 4 x 120w LED floodlights with battery and pole and solar panel in Africa to communities to have 60m x 40m football games, so I am on the cusp of importing a 150W LED floodlight as a sample to test to maybe get 4 to light up the other side of my local football field. I mean 4 x 150W and my 1Kw Yamaha will be just ticking over. We don't have access to mains power on the other side and we want to have night games.

I just found out thanks to Yaris that my Engel will run three days on the 100 a/h battery and probably would have gone another day but the power is back on. The battery got down to 11.8 volts and I was going to swap for the boat battery when it dipped below 11 volts. Unfortunately as you surmised the solar panel was not much help with only about three hours of decent sunlight in that time.
It meant being able to keep some essentials cool and I don't mean beer, had to scrounge around for ice for that. Had we lived in Cardwell or Tully there would have been no chance of ice.
Last July we went to the Cape and it was uncharacteristically cloudy for the time of year. Not having a dual system, I used the 100 a/h battery by night and took the Engel with us by day on side trips to run off the car battery when we weren't actually travelling. That worked OK.
I am trying to avoid a generator for space/weight reasons but it certainly would have been handy at home these last couple of days keeping the freezer alive.
But then the last cyclone that gave us an outage of more than 24 hours was Winifred in 1986.
As I said in a post about something else, it's all a compromise between wants and budget and expected usage.