When I was a teenager, I bought solar cells from an Allied Radio catalog and mounted them on top of my portable radio. It worked pretty well and was popular on the beach. Years later I loaned it to a neighbor in our apartment complex, and he stole the solar cells off the radio.
Years later I saw a Hoffman solar radio on my dad’s countertop.
I bought this “Emergency” radio almost 50 years later.
I’ll never forget being deployed with the Air National Guard and I ended up in the middle of the dessert with a dead cell phone battery and had to run a 60KW generator to charge my Cell phone.
I bought these solar charged battery banks thinking they’d help. They had several problems that limit their usefulness. You cannot leave it out in the weather and will be damaged by a passing rain shower. The battery struggles with the rise in temperature of being in the sun. The solar panel was too small and produces too little power to be useful.
I bought and carried a folding USB solar panel similar to the one above with me after that. Over the years those USB panels got a little bit bigger and a lot more efficient to where they’d push a couple amps so I gave them to my siblings for emergencies.
The rigid solar panels 80-100W were getting reasonably priced so a couple years ago (2012 ish) I started buying them a couple at a time until I had twelve of them in my garage. When I quit my full time job in 2017 I laid one of them on the roof in the winter for a couple days to gather some data. One of my requirements is to provide 200WH of power for my CPAP. I have enough battery for a couple days, but going without it is not an option. After a couple days I found out that one panel in the winter sun was not going to provide enough power. I grabbed a second panel and bolted them together making a 200W 36V array that should provide approximately 360WH of power per day in December. (The worst month.)
Since I sleep at night with a CPAP the power has to make a round trip into and out of a battery which has a significant cost. But I can also live on six hours of sleep if I have to. During the summer months those two panels produce almost 900WH/Day which can keep our battery powered refrigerator running and have enough left over for Cell Phones and USB charged lanterns. It is my opinion that all homes ought to have these two panels to provide USB power for the occupants during an emergency.