Powerfilm USB+AA Solar Charger Review

I decided to get one of these for my latest canoe trip to Temagami – I was curious and thought it would hopefully kill two birds with one stone – charge my smartphone which I primarily use for occasionally listening to music, and charge AA batteries for my GPS.  It cost me around $100 from MEC.  But after using it for a week, honestly, I don’t know if this thing is more trouble than it’s worth.  Possibly it would be good for very long multi-week trips, but for anything within a week, just bring some extra batteries.

Made of ballistic nylon, this charger has a slot for two AA batteries to charge when unrolled.  It has 4 solar panels, and a USB port on one side of it.  It is somewhat light, measuring 135 grams on my scale, but the performance isn’t all that awesome, to be honest.  In ideal conditions - full sun, light falling 90 degrees to the panels, it apparently puts out .4Amps.  That means it would take over 6 hours to charge a fully discharged set of EneloopXX  AAbatteries… and again let me remind you that this is under ideal conditions which it rarely would be when traveling in the backcountry, so best hopes are to charge one set of AA batteries in an entire day.  While traveling canoeing/portaging/camping, I found myself having to fiddle with it regularlyto make sure it was exposed to the sun, that is when the sun was available.

As for operation - the charger has a small LED on one side of it.  It flashes slowly when charging, is solid when the batteries are deemed charged, and flashes quickly if it thinks there’s a battery problem. I find the LED not that visible.  It can only be seen from the one side where it’s located.  Then,  there’s the USB charging.  It requires the AA batteries be in the unit for the USB charger to work properly (and both AA batteries be at the same charge).  At first that seems strange, but I suppose it makes sense, to ensure the USB wouldn’t be powering on and off if the sun dipped behind some clouds.  The AA batteries can charge the USB device when there is not even any sun at the end of the day.

 I find several flaws in the design… firstly there is the weight of it.  I assume this product is for backpacking and backcountry use, otherwise someone would be using an auto charger or something else, but the design isn’t really optimized for weight, like most backpacker oriented products are, nowadays.  I could easily redesign it myself to take out at least half the weight (or better yet add more panels for the same weight to get much quicker charging).  There really is no need for the ballistic nylon – much lighter ripstip would do, it’s not like you are rubbing this thing up against something else while using it….  Or at least you would have to try hard to do that.  Also there’s an additional superfluous flap of nylon that really serves no purpose, other than to wrap the thing up for storage, and there’s a thick bar of plastic screwed to the top which also serves no purpose either, other than to stick the instruction label to.  The back side has an overly thick electronics housing on the back.  I find the AA socket terrible due to the fact it’s very hard to remove the batteries without resorting to finding an object to pry them out of the housing, because the spring is a high force and buries the nose of the battery almost flush with the surrounding housing.  In addition to that making it difficult to remove the batteries is the door, which only opens 90 degrees and thus makes it impossible for me to slap-remove batteries, like I do for almost all handheld devices that use batteries – my remotes, GPS, phone, etc, I take the battery cover off and slap it to instantly remove the batteries without needing to dig them out with fingernails or pry the batteries out.  In any case the 90 degree door makes it impossible to slap remove the batteries.

There’s also the waterproofness of it…. the electronic board isn’t conformal coated which it should be for outdoor use for moisture protection.  It also says it is not waterproof at all, although it should not suffer much damage unless constantly submerged with batteries in it.  Any product like this should surely be able to withstand being left outside in the rain.    Lastly, I also don’t know why it only supports AA and not AAA batteries.  Almost all popular headlamps nowadays use AAA batteries, and there’s no reason for it to not support AAA format – almost any other AA charger can support AAA charging nowadays.

I honestly wanted to like this charger at the outset and think it is useful to carry on trips, but in practice it is only marginally useful… like I said, at least for trips up to a week +, I think someone would probably be better off just carrying some extra batteries until the weight, power output, ease of battery removal, and AAA battery support is improved.  You could carry 4 extra charged AA batteries for the same weight of this charger.