This is Serena from Shanghai Zhongji Electrical Co., ltd. We are professional manufactory and exporter for different kinds of solar lights, such as solar lawn lights, solar courtyard lights, solar road lights, solar road stud, solar skeleton light, solar road side light, solar pavement light, solar traffic light etc. With headquarter locaded in Shanghai of China, manufacture base in Zhejiang, all of our products are designed by ourselves, so we have strong technical advantages compared with other local companies, which is also the convincing guarantee of high quality. Most of our products have passed CE, TUV, IEC certification, Presently, all our products are sold to European market, America, Middle east, South-east Asia, and have initially gained the favorable evaluation from clients.

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Best Regards,

Serena Lee

Nice for backup charging and learning. For any real application you would need a ton of these though.

I charged it before using it. It gets plenty of sunlight, but the battery seems to be junk.

There might be other solar lights that will work for you, but perhaps a simple flashlight/lantern would work better. At least when the battery dies, you can replace it.

Be sure to size your system appropriately to minimize voltage drop to your inverter.

Sunforce isnt the cheapest, but still a good price and a nice, solid product with a 25-year warranty.

Note: GET A SOLAR SURVEY – you might not qualify for any tax rebates if you dont get one!

Also do the math yourself. If you live on the 43rd paralell and get 4.4 sun hours per day average, do NOT place these at 43 degrees! Tilt them closer to the SUMMER sun angle. You’ll get more sun in summer and less in winter, but you arent getting much in winter anyways! You’ll get more yearly output (or get a tracker and not do any math)

The technology is getting better; cheaper manufacturing processes and better spectrum band as well as improvements leading to higher efficiencies. If you want better stuff, I dont know how “long” you should wait. It can only get so good, the potput isnt going to duble or anything. Laws of physics

The reading light looks like it would be barely adequate to read by. The flashlight is like the coin size led lights that are worn on key chains. Since it has the reading light, with 5 LEDs, the flashlight really seems useless, although it does have the flashing red mode, which is kind of cool.

I was quite impressed with the sound and general performance. I was able to bring in some SW stations and receive a lot of AM stations. I don’t really listen to FM. The weather band works well. One of the reviews mentions an auxillary antenna that helps short wave reception. My radio doesn’t have any such feature.

I did try the solar cells in bright sunlight and it seemed to work.

I bought a similar radio from Radio Shack about 8 years ago, a Grundig FR200, and I used the hand crank a lot. It did seem to wear, and stopped turning smoothly, but it still works. I suspect this radio will be the same. The crank seems to squeak when its being turned hard, and I wonder if a shot of WD40 would help.

I listen to the radio quite a bit, and this is the radio I’m using now. I have NiCad batteries in it. I’m sure they’ll work for many hours before needing recharging. Its pretty unlikely that a set of 3 AA batteries will go dead before an emergency has resolved itself, but I like the crank and solar cells anyway.

I’m a Ham radio operator, and this radio is not real high quality. But for the price, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it is made. The tuning knob is smooth; the speaker is only 2 inches but seems bigger. None of the cell phone charging plugs works in my cell phone, so I won’t be using that feature. I doubt if it would work very well for that purpose, given how hard it is to charge the tiny internal battery.

All in all, a nice little radio!