I Bought This Portable Solar Panel on Amazon

0:00 hi everyone welcome back to my next video today we're going to talk about solar panels and i know i talk about solar panels a lot so it's going to be really simple stuff [Music] there is a new item out for solar it's pretty new to me and some of you may not have heard of it even yet it's uh

0:20 this is right here i'm standing with a zamp solar 200 watt folding suitcase so these are hard panels and it's two 100 watt panels that total uh 200 watts really nice high quality uh little details everywhere really high quality but it's really big and heavy it's 50 pounds and it's really awkward to carry in and

0:43 out of the van and to find a place to store it in the van and yet so you say well why would you use that why wouldn't you just mount it on the roof well a lot of people don't have room on the roof a lot of rvs you can't go find hardly any space on the roof especially the class b's you can't

0:58 hardly find space on the roof if you're in a car uh you're not going to mount much of a panel up on your roof and so a lot of people want to lay them on the ground because they don't want holes in the roofs they can't fit them on the roof and another option besides this one is the flexible you know the ones that

1:15 kind of flex a bit they're usually just like a standard panel except they're soft and flexible problem is with those they break man they're wonderful because they weigh four pounds they're easy to carry in and out you just can store them on the bed but they don't have the durability i

1:30 mean if you do that daily if you get a year or two of service out of one that would be really odd so you have these two the the big cumbersome although the 100 waters of these is a lot easier and a lot lighter but it's still cumbersome um or the or you have the advantage of the soft

1:48 and flexible but boy there they don't hold up there's a new kid on the block it was new to me and i've bought five of them to test for you let me show you what they are they are i'm not even sure what to call them uh i'm going to call them soft folding suitcase solar panels so you can see

2:09 it's all cloth there's almost there's almost no metal in it it's all cloth and plastic and it's very small and uh this one this is the brinji and that's it it's got 250 watt panels it's 100 watts and look how small this is and easy uh i can easily you know i'm an old guy and this is my

2:30 weak arm with the big scars in it and i can easily hold that out like that i don't think i can do it on this one this end's not doing so well i can uh but you know i i mean this is nothing another huge advantage of the soft portable ones like this is their plug and play as you'll

2:45 see they're just clamps you clamp onto your battery post and you're done no installation no drilling holes in your roof no hiring somebody no climbing up there yourself they tilt easily you can track the sun with the tilt there's a lot of advantages and a lot of reasons why people choose the portable suitcase ones

3:07 over mounted panels and there's a thousand reasons i can think of to buy one of these soft ones as opposed to a hard one but will they hold up that's the test you and i could fault play frisbee with this we wouldn't but we could uh and and the controller is in the inside here we're going to test it here

3:26 in a minute we're going to do an amp hour testing on it this is tiny i think i paid 250 dollars for this it's a renegy and renzi is a good company if i have any problems with it i'm sending it back and they're fixing it this is made by zamp solar it's 200 watts and zam solar makes high

3:42 quality stuff all the little details on this are high quality you can just see it this is really quality made well made will last a very long time this is a thousand dollars for 200 watts well this is 250 dollars for 100 watts you buy two of them and it's still nothing in weight and uh it's

4:03 500 in for the same so this is going to be half the price of this the question is will it hold up and we don't know yet but it's made by renegy and so they're going to back it up you send it to them and it's reasonable to mail this you can find a box to mail this back to renegy and say hey this broke fix it and

4:23 they'll fix it you're going to mail this to bend oregon these things are made in bend oregon you're going to mail this to bend oregon it's a project you're going to mail this to bend oregon it's going to cost 100 bucks to send this by ups to bend oregon i don't know but it's going to be a lot

4:40 and so yeah i don't know yet the quality i have bought five different brands of these dokio is the price leader they're really cheap and we're gonna do an unboxing and we'll show you the unboxing all the different ones i bought i bought three dokios an 80 a 100 and a 250 and i bought this one and an echo power we'll

4:58 talk about all that later but right now i want to test the amp hours we want to test the amp hours coming out of the batteries so i'm going to lay this one out and lay the renegy out and we're going to compare the amp hours between the two okay let's lay this out we'll do an amp hour test now

5:23 so that goes that goes up boy folks this weighs a ton the the lady that owns this is 70 years old and you're you could i would never buy one of these first i wouldn't spend a thousand dollars for 200 watts but i'd never buy anything that was this heavy and awkward to carry i don't care

5:46 how good zamp is i just wouldn't do it one of the great things about it is though that it um it's got these great legs so i can angle it to the sun that's really a great thing uh and you this doesn't have any legs uh no practical way to angle it you'd have to prop it up with something and it's so

6:12 light i wouldn't put it out up in any wind i've laid it on the ground flat with some pretty heavy winds recently and that has been no problem [Applause] okay so i've connected it to this windy nation 100 amp hour battery i'm going to use my

6:39 amp meter with an amp meter this opens the cable goes in it and you close it you can only have one cable at a time you can't have positive negative or two cables one cable at a time and it will read the amps flowing through it so right now yeah 10 6. so right now this one this 200 watt

6:59 zamp is putting out 10.6 amps that's really good it's producing it's really full power that's that's very good we'll connect the renegy so again uh to test it all you have to do is put either the positive or

7:24 negative doesn't matter which one through the cable and it's uh 5.28 it's producing exactly half the power right now so you're getting 5.2 and you're getting 10.6 oh so it's not quite almost it's not quite half um exactly half but it's so close that

7:49 they're we're going to call them essentially the same so for this is 250 uh or 500 for two of them to produce 200 watts and that one is a thousand dollars and 50 pounds and extremely awkward and heavy extremely awkward and heavy uh this one is light and easy to throw around you can see the

8:08 advantages to the renegy so you can see the advantages to this even if it doesn't hold up as well it costs half the price per watt now that wouldn't be a fair comparison if you bought 100 watt uh echo worthy or 100 watt renegy because the price would be about basically the same and then you'd have the hard one

8:27 that would last forever and this one which may or may not so that's what this test will be all about we're going to continue to test them how long do they hold up i'm going to loan them out to people who will test them for me and right now i would definitely buy two of the renergie as opposed to one of the

8:44 zamp so much life is so much simpler but that's up to you be sure to stand by to watch the unboxing video and then the amp hour testing and we'll keep you tuned as the months go by to tell you how they hold up so stay tuned leave a comment below and tell me what do you think is the zamp and the high quality of this

9:05 amp worth the extra money if you've got anything out of this video like us on youtube subscribe to the channel hit that thumbs up button and we'll talk to you later [Music]