Big Blue Solar Panel Review (3 Yrs Full-Time Everyday Use) 

Absolutely!

Yep that’s what I always thought

Yeah it’s been working great!

Yeah I can’t believe it either

Glad it helps!

No problem

Only if something’s plugged in. You’d need a battery pack to store the charge to use later.

I have the 28W bigblue without the digital meter. I used it on a 2 month bicycle ride from California to Missouri during the summer months. I used it to charge an Anker 20,000 mAh battery that I used to charge my phone & bicycle lights. If I remember correctly, it took about 15 hours to fully charge a depleted 20,000 mAh battery. I might be off by a little bit. Hope that helps. I really like the solar panel. Much better than a dynamo hub. I was able to charge on days that I wasn't riding. On riding days, I strapped it across my rear panniers. For those 2 months, I never used a wall plug & rough camped the entire time.

Man, that’s too bad! Thanks for that info. I just haven’t had any issues like this with mine. It charges a large Jackery battery bank fully over the day. I also get charge even when it’s not full sun. As far as a small battery bank like a 10k or even a smartphone, like an hour of sun will charge them fully. I do think it’s possible that you got a faulty one, like you said? Hopefully that’s not a common occurrence. I was planning on getting another Big Blue once this one goes out, since I’ve had good luck with it. Here’s hoping the 2nd one is just as good. I’ll bring an update when the time comes, but I’m trying to ride out the current panel as long as I can… 🤞

Another thought..sometimes the cords give me trouble. The phone will toggle between charge/not because the cords are such junk. Not saying that’s your issue but something to consider. Too bad so many things are made to fail.

@@ParadiseOnPennies Yes, I am aware of the (surprisingly?) varying quality of USB cords. I have good cords. But anyway I used the same cord on the 3 year old 20W Sokoo panel, and it outperformed this 28W one (with no constant cycling with low loads). Actually, I was using the short USB cord which came with the Big Blue for some of my testing. So maybe that's also junk, like the panel. 🙂 I'm not positive what's going on. Maybe bad QC. Maybe they had to go with a charge regulator chip substitution, due to the current chip shortage. I also often suspect that sometimes sellers/manufacturers use high quality components for their initial offerings, but then downgrade once they've built up a lot of great product reviews. Perhaps they couldn't sustain a good margin with the quality components (maybe the supplier raised prices) or they just decided to try and cut corners, to try and make more money. It just seems like often the steady, super high, ratings are often from earlier raters, and the lower ratings seem to be more skewed to be from more recent ones. Anyway, I appreciate this review, as it is valuable to find how something has stood the test of time. Often early ratings are not valuable, as they don't give a good idea of longevity. But it will naturally be less relevant to current purchases if there is a significantly different level of quality for the latest units.

Everything we own runs on solar so we don’t want to run the battery down. This is way nicer