Solar Charger, Wednesday 2nd May 2018

A new bit of kit

Having *just* taken the decision to get back into doing more backpacking & wild camping this year (any excuse to get away) I took the plunge and bought a Solar Battery Charger for the princely sum of £33.90 including shipping, from www.mobilesolarchargers.co.uk

My choice was influenced by my mate Rob (photographer extraordinaire, box player, dance caller, drinker of beer and all-round good egg). Rob used the lower power version of this charger on our recent Via De La Plata trundle in Spain. The sunlight levels in Sunny Spain (the clue is in the name) are significantly higher than in UK and his charger performed well.

I’m quite realistic, the UK isn’t known for high levels of sunlight so I don’t expect this to be a cure-all for charging problems. This bit of kit has an advertised 3watts of (solar) charging rate, allowing for UK conditions I’d expect something like 1 – 1.5watts, maybe a little more in very strong sunshine.

From the website:

My initial impression is that it’s fairly robust and will probably stand a bit of knocking about. It’s not waterproof although I expect it will stand a bit of spray for a short time, and at 270gms it’s not horribly heavy.

Time will tell, I’m off on the TGO Challenge next week…we’ll see.

Details here.

25th June 2014, Does size matter?

Time for a changNow that the nights are closing in I’ve been spending time doing other stuff in the long and dark evenings. Like thinking about things.

One of the things that has been bouncing around my little brain is size. Well not particularly size per se, but the units of measurement used to specify size – length and height in particular.
I’m thinking more of the units of measurement I use when describing a route that I’ve walked or cycled.
Should I use good old imperial feet and inches, or the new-fangled SI, metric system?
‘Imperial’ does sound rather superior though. On the other hand it’s much easier to calculate in units of 10 rather that 12, 25.4, 36, 1760 etc.
Kilometres fly by so much more quickly than miles – but there’s always more of them to cover. Ascent in metres is a whole different ball game when measured in feet. It’s a perception thing.
It’s a tough one.
These things are important. In 1999 NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because an outsourced engineering team used imperial units of measurement whilst the NASA team used the metric system for a particular spacecraft operation.
From the ever informative wired.com:

Metric Math(s) Mistake Muffed Mars Meteorology Mission

Thoughts anybody?