ECO-WORTHY 25 Watts 12V Off Grid Solar Battery Charger Kit: Waterproof Solar Panel + Adjustable Mount Bracket + SAE Connection Cable +10A Charge Controller for Car RV Marine Boat 12V Battery

I now own two of these and I still can't get the eco-worthy controller to show only LED 1 which indicates a sealed battery. It always shows LED one and two. The directions are confusing or inaccurate. This controller cannot recognize a battery for what it is. Again I have purchased a small MTTP controller that has no trouble whatsoever identifying what my battery is. ___________________ I gave this a five stars because it seemed unfair to ding my review over the fact that the controller that came with it to proved to be unworkable. After 6:00 or 7 readings of the directions I was unable to make the controller recognize and AGM battery. The AGM would go under sealed battery but it kept staying on two lights which meant that it was either a lithium battery or a gel battery. You can't run an AGM battery on anything other than sealed or AGM. For that reason I had to move to a tiny MTTP controller that worked instantly and made it very easy for me to link the battery with the solar panel. I think that it's a very nice system and I'm using it to trickle charge and AGM battery over winter. My plan is to buy another one of these and set it up in the same way to trickle charge over winter a typical sealed battery. Here is something you'll really love. I set this up approximately 24 hours before hurricane Helene hit the mountains of Western North Carolina. The solar panel was set up on a 4x4 post with a 2x4 support that formed a cross. The cord on the panel is very long and makes connection into a outdoor storage cabinet very easy. I then connected some green covered ground wire to a 4 ft piece of rebar next to the 4x4 post. I then stapled the ground wire such that it was not going to pull on the solar panel. The result was very pleasing. It's survived 40 to 60 mile an hour winds. I do hope to figure out why I was unable to program the control panel that came with it.

works well, but I wish they put a disconnect near the panel, as the control box is near the charging end. I want to mount the controller near the panel in certain cases. The cord seems heavy duty.

Simple setup. Although not mentioned in the description, the box states 4 amps. That is not correct watts devided by volts is the formula. 24 watts divider by 12 volts is basiclt 2 amps. I knew this in advanced. 2 amps is a decent trickle charge The charge controller protect the battery from over charging.

The solar panel and the charge controller itself work great. The wires are junk, wasting 10-20% of the total solar power and causing charging issues. The charge controller is not waterproof or even water resistant, and it takes patience to attach wires to the green connector. Otherwise, the charger works well. Rather than return it, I fixed these problems for about 15 dollars. Actual specs: I measured this unit putting 1.4 amps into my low car battery on a sunny day in December in Maine. That's about 18 watts in the middle of winter, pretty good for a 20 watt panel. That was before I fixed the wiring. The label on the back of the solar panel has slightly different specs than the Amazon title. It says 25 watts max power. See attached photo. Charge controller: The included charge controller works well. It's an intelligent 3A PWM charger that automatically switches through 3 charging phases: bulk, absorption, float (trickle). It has an LED to indicate when it has solar power and what charging phase it's in. It will prevent over discharging below 10.8 volts and over charging above 14.4 volts. At one point I thought my charger was broken and started looking for a replacement. A decent PWM charger like this runs 15-20, so it's a decent value. I later discovered the charger was fine, the problem was the cheap included wires (see below). I was a little worried about the charger consuming battery power when there isn't any sun. Cheaper chargers use a little battery power overnight and on very cloudy days while waiting for the sun to come back. I wanted to leave my system unattended for months during our short and cloudy winter days without discharging my battery, so I can't tolerate much current drain when the sun is gone. Amazon didn't list the current drain when I bought it. I measured the charger's current drain with no sun at about 1mA. That seems pretty reasonable compared to 10-50mA with other chargers. The charger ships with a spec sheet, which lists the current drain as 1.5mA (see attached). The spec sheet says the charger is made for Gel batteries. It seems to work fine on my SUV car battery though. Cheap wires: I measured my battery voltage while charging on a sunny day. 13-14 volts is normal, but I was only getting 12.4 volts. I thought the controller had gone bad so I tried another one. Same problem. I tried lots of things, went over all the connections many many times but nothing worked. It definitely had power coming from the solar panel, it just wasn't getting to the battery. Over a few days I did notice the battery charge increasing very slowly, but the charger kept thinking the battery was fully charged too soon and kept turning off (trickle mode) too early. I finally had the idea to check the battery voltage at the other end of the battery wires (where they connect to the charger). The charger was putting out 13.6 volts at about 1.5 amps, but only 12.4 volts was getting to the battery. That's 10% of the solar power being wasted by wire resistance! It was also enough to fool the charger into thinking the battery was charged and switching to a low power mode, which throws away even more of the generated power. It will still charge your battery eventually assuming you aren't using the battery for something else, but it will be slow. I replaced all the wire with normal 16 gauge wire, and it fixed everything. I measured 13.6 volts at the charger and 13.5 volts at the battery while charging at 1.5 amps. It charges much faster now, and I can use the battery to power other things. I attached a picture of the cheap wires they include and some normal 16AWG wires I replaced them with. On the outside it's deceiving because the cheap wires look reasonably thick. But if you cut into it you'll see the cheap wires are almost all rubber insulation and have very little actual metal inside. Replacement wire: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NSGCVWI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_feSyyb487STEM Waterproofing: The actual solar panel appears waterproof and has white silicone around the edges on the back. However the charger is definitely NOT waterproof. It came with clear silicone applied along the bottom of the green connector, but that's pointless since the top and sides of the connector have bigger openings and were left unsealed. I needed the charger to work outside in the winter in rain, snow, ice, etc., so any water intrusion could easily freeze and damage things. You could always buy silicone and seal all the openings including the holes in the green connector where the wires attach, but then it will be a pain if you ever want to remove and reattach the wires later. I ended up opening the charger box and spraying conformal coat to waterproof all the electronics. Then I drilled a 1/8" hole in the white box to allow any water that gets in to drain back out. Takes about 10 minutes. So far it's holding up well to our Maine winter environment! Conformal coat: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BXSMNWG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_AbSyybQ2NH5G4 I didn't see any of this information posted anywhere else, so hopefully some people will find this info helpful!

Works as it should to open and close my automatic chicken door as long as the sun is shining. If there are days of cloudy skies or rain then I have had issues but that isn’t the units problem it is the nature of solar power.

Great item for certain applications, I got it to help keep my tractor charged... It can help but usually only in the summer time when there's not a lot of clouds.

First of all, I decided to buy this product because I used an electric lunch box in my car for several days and my battery started to need a charge. I didn't want to be disconnecting the car battery to charge it, so I saw some very good reviews about this product. It even comes with a USB charger and I thought it would be very useful. To start with, the product doesn't turn on if the battery isn't connected, which is strange because it had almost 18V input that the solar panel sent to it and so my idea that if one day I didn't have a charger for my cell phone I would just put it on the solar panel without needing a battery died. It does charge through the USB port, but in reality it is powered by the battery and not the panel, which causes a discharge in the battery. I did several tests and they didn't last long because instead of charging my battery, it discharged it. I attached photos of the voltage that went down instead of up. My idea was to keep using my electric lunch box to heat my lunch and leave the panel charging all day so that when I finished work I would find the battery maybe not fully charged but with some charge, but it didn't work, I don't know if the product has some defect but it didn't work for me. It should turn on only with the solar panel on sunny days to be able to charge with the USB port without needing a battery and above all charge the battery because it didn't do that it only consumed voltage from the battery to turn on the module.

Solar panel and accessories arrived really quickly with no damage. Use the panel along with an inverter, 12v battery and remote gate receiver on the top of a hill to power open the gate with my cell phone using the house wifi. Our electric gate is "not line of sight" and below a small hill, so had to make a large wooden box to hold everything and put the 25w solar panel on top of the box to power the gate. Also have a wifi booster on the house with points toward the box about 150 feet away, and the box with solar, battery, inverter and remote receiver point toward the gate about 500 feet away. So far, the solar panel holds the battery at 13.0, and the gate opens and closes from the house even though I can't see it until I drive down and around the hill. Originally had a 10w solar panel, but it wouldn't hold the battery charge enough and without the battery being charged properly each day, the gate wouldn't open/close.