Small-scale solar power comes to electronics

If you're sick of buying dell studio 1537 battery, dell studio 1737 battery those alkaline batteries and tossing them every couple months, you can get rechargeables and juice them up in a green way.

The low-end solar chargers do the job but take several hours in the sun to charge up a few batteries such as Hp F4486B battery. That's OK, if you have plenty of spare batteries and time.

But I was eager to get something a little more powerful, so I could get rechargeables filled up within a few hours. And, I figured that a larger panel could also power up my phone, and maybe portable DVD player.

I wasn't able to find a whole lot of products that fit this requirement. But if you're willing to pay somewhere between $100 and $300, you have options. You can either buy a single charger for batteries and gadgets, or you could buy a small panel with the right cables to do the job.

Choices among the panels themselves are growing as well. Most panels are made from silicon and often have that cobalt blue look.

But the emergence of flexible thin-film solar cells are a great option for portable applications, although you'll pay more per watt for the convenience.

There are rollable or foldable panels sold under the PowerFilm or Sunlinq brand names that let you pack up a panel into a small package. They range from 5 watts, which would be good for batteries and gadgets sony vaio vgn-fz4000 battery, sony vaio vgn-fz430e battery, up to 25 watts, which could even be used to power a laptop.

Laptops: Wondering whether I could find a simple way to power my laptop took a sizable chunk of my holiday vacation time and, in the end, I didn't get what I wanted.

The problem with laptops is that, unlike music players, newer models consume more and more energy, according to Ed Bender, the president of Sundance Solar, which sells solar goods for portable applications or educational purposes.

"Laptops are tricky," he said. "In general, electronics power usage is going down. That's not true of laptops. People are getting bigger monitors, like with the new Macs, especially if they use them to play DVDs."

Sundance used to recommend that people buy a 10- or 20-watt panel and a cord (in the style of a car adapter) to plug into their laptop. But for many applications, that approach simply doesn't produce enough electricity, Bender said.

Instead, you need a panel and a back-up battery that your laptop plugs into.

Global Solar, which makes the Sunlinq foldable solar panels for military and mobile applications, lays out different options (click here for PDF), which includes an $89 Xantrex small back-up battery or a smaller lithium polymer battery from Tekkeon.

I priced out a setup acer aspire 3810t battery, acer aspire 3820t battery with a relatively small 12-watt foldable panel, the Tekkeon MyPower All battery. Add a necessary cable, and it was about $350. A larger 25-watt foldable panel adds about $200 more to the setup.

If you were serious about having a solar-powered laptop, a larger panel makes sense, says Sundance Solar's Bender who said his company equipped a team of people who went to Antarctica using a 40-watt rigid panel, which costs about $300, to power their computers.

And now I'm eagerly awaiting NRG Dock's laptop charger. Wattenmaker said it can charge in an hour and provide several hours of laptop time. The price will be about $800 before rebates, he says.

So, in short, solar-powered laptops are doable but you're going to pay for the portability (or the fun of your science experiment).

For gadgets and batteries, though hp mini 210 battery, hp mini 2102 battery, affordable pocket-size solar power is already here.