 Welcome to Road Gear Reviews. I'm Julie and I'm Mark from RVLove and today we're reviewing the Renegi 100 watt solar suitcase. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Road Gear Reviews. So today we're reviewing the Renegi 100 watt solar suitcase. It's a portable, affordable, all-in-one plug-and-play solar solution that you can use to charge your RV, car, truck, even boat batteries using just the power from the sun. Yeah, and what's great about it is it's everything is just in this little suitcase. It's 21 inches by 21 inches by 3 inches. It has its little semi-rigid case. It has the built-in handle as part of the actual frame of the solar panels, not part of the case so that you don't have to have the case to be carrying around the solar panel. It has two little clips that open up so that you can see both sides of the solar panel. So when it falls out, it'll be twice the size of what you see here. These are monocrystalline solar panels opposed to polycrystalline solar panels. Monocrystalline is more efficient, usually a little bit more effective solar solution than polycrystalline. The easy way to tell the difference is monocrystalline are black and polycrystalline are bluish hue. What's great about this is it's fully enclosed solar system. Once you open up the case, you'll see that everything you need is inside. There's two junction boxes, an adventure charge controller that's 30 amp and has an LCD screen to show you any of the important information. It has a four-stage smart charge controller so you don't have to worry about it overcharging your batteries. It has a 10 foot long cord with alligator clips so it's easy to connect to your battery and it'll automatically recognize whether or not your system is a 12 volt or 24 volt system. The charge controller comes defaulted for flooded batteries but you can change it to sealed or gel type batteries. There's two additional items in this bag and they're a remote temperature sensor and a remote battery voltage sensor but you don't need those for everyday operation. The LCD's display rotates through the panel array voltage, the charge current, the generated energy, the battery voltage, the battery percent, and the temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius. Beautiful sunny day, perfect day to use solar. We'll set this up and show you how it works. Just a couple clips on the top, opens up. Here's the 10 foot cord with alligator clips. Legs fold out right out of the frame. Just turn a quick knob and they slide out, one on each side. It's nice you can adjust these legs on this axis and this axis so you have a lot of control to get it pointed directly at the sun. Just tighten the knob, turn the panels towards the sun, grab your alligator clips and connect it to your battery. In our RV, the batteries are in the stairwell into the entrance of the coach. It's a little bit tricky for ours because we have to hook these up underneath and then access the panel but that just takes a minute. Just pull this access panel out of our stairs and my batteries are right inside. Since I put the alligator clips up underneath, now all I have to do is reach down and grab them from the top and I connect these to the terminals. Connecting the black one to the negative terminal first and then the red one to the positive terminal and that's it. Alright, now that we're hooked up to the battery, let's look at the information and see what's saying on the charge controller. When we ordered this on Amazon Prime, it was defaulted to Celsius because Renegades is a Canadian company but it was really easy to change the Fahrenheit. So it rotates through all the information automatically but you can also do it manually by clicking the buttons forward and backward. This is the panel volts. This is the amps that it's currently bringing in and it says 0.3 amps because I'm pointing it away from the sun. If I was pointing it towards the sun, it'd probably be 5 or 6 amps right now. Now that we've turned the panel around to face the sun, let's have a look at how many more amps it's pulling in. It's about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. We're pulling in about 6 amps which is actually pretty good. The highest I've ever seen it was 6.2. When it's been really cloudy, it's usually about 0.5. So 6 amps is actually very good. It's more amps pulling in than we are going out. So right now our batteries are charging. So we've been full time on the road now for almost 3 years and we've really only boondocked about a handful of times which is one of the big reasons why we never bought solar earlier. A number of reasons for that. One is we really mostly stay hooked up in campgrounds. So really solar was a big investment. We didn't want to be spending thousands of dollars on a full solar array. In addition our coach is right up against the legal and safe weight limit so we didn't want to be adding extra solar panels and extra batteries to be able to hold the power from a solar setup. We reached a point where we thought a portable solar 100 watt panel is just going to be ideal for our needs. So as Julie said we're mostly going to be in campgrounds but when we boondock we have an RV that has fairly low needs for electricity. We have a propane fridge, we have propane water heater, propane stove top and a propane furnace. So our batteries really just need to power a few LED lights in the evening and charge our laptops and cell phones and other small electronics like that. So we don't have a big needs for electricity. Now 100 watts is great for us. Some people might need even less, maybe a 60 watt but people that have a residential refrigerator or watch a lot of television or have a lot of other high draw electric needs, they would need a lot more solar than this. That said this solar panel could still be a great accompaniment for a permanent installation because when you do a permanent installation it's usually on the roof and you have to wait for the sun to come up really high before it can start hitting that solar on the rooftop whereas these portable units you can point them directly at the early morning sun and the late evening sun and if there's a tree you can move the solar panel out from underneath it. Now with a 10 foot cord you can't get too crazy moving it around but it is nice to have a little bit of extra variability in capturing the early and late sun. And this is the third time we've used this solar panel now and about the last month the actual solar suitcase itself is great, super easy plug and play but the instructions left a bit to be desired. Yeah I was actually pretty disappointed in that because I'm one of the kind of people that when I receive a product I like to read the whole instructions to get really familiar with it before I use it so I don't risk damaging it. There was a little pamphlet that said we don't send instruction booklets with these portable units anymore check us out online to learn how to use your panel. When I went online I got even more confused because when I looked up the 100 watt solar panel it referenced a completely different solar controller and it was very confusing to me. So as a new solar consumer I thought that was a bad experience when I was looking on the internet and couldn't find any information that didn't make me more confused so I actually called them and what was interesting is when I called them I realized just how simple this is all you do is just take it out of the box, plug it into your battery because our batteries are flooded batteries which is what it comes defaulted to so it was super simple and it would have been great to have a simple one sheet that said those few things if you have a flooded battery just plug it into your batteries and you're good to go if you don't have a flooded battery this is how you change to the type of battery that you have so that was my biggest complaint about the product is I thought the instructions were kind of bad but we've been very happy with it it's been doing exactly what we hoped for it provides us the power to keep our batteries charged up for our lights and for our small electronics now we didn't have the goal of having this solar completely replace our generator and other sources we just wanted to dramatically reduce the time we use our generator we were boondocking in quartzite recently and it was kind of cold weather and we needed to run our generator a lot to be able to power up our batteries for the furnace and for some of our electronics to cook some more meals and we ended up having to run our generator three and four sometimes even five hours a day and it's a big very thirsty with fuel economy generator so we spent a half tank of fuel in our RV that was about 35-40 gallons of fuel in two weeks just basically charging up batteries where if we had a solar setup we would have dramatically reduced that which helps pay for the cost of the solar really quick so now that we're starting to do a lot more boondocking it just made sense for us to get a little bit of solar to meet our basic needs of keeping our coach batteries, lights, electronics charged up we consider this kind of the gateway drug to solar I'm sure that now that we've got this and we're experiencing the joys that getting power directly from the sun brings we'll probably be looking at a bigger solar array sometime down the track but probably not in the RV we currently have now I think well because of the space and the weight limitations of our RV we don't really have enough to add extra battery so I think for now this portable solution is going to be just enough for what we need but it's definitely given us a great taste for solar power and so in our next RV we'll definitely be more interested in upgrading to a larger solar system Yeah, in that wake capacity that Julie's mentioning that's a big deal because solar panels can weigh 20 and 30 pounds a piece and you put a whole bunch of those on the roof that's only part of the problem when you do a bigger installation you're going to want to have a large battery bank and those batteries can weigh anywhere from 60 to 150 pounds a piece and so you put four, six, or eight of those batteries in your RV that's hundreds and hundreds of pounds and like we were saying earlier this kit is only 20 pounds So I'm super super happy with it so far in the month that we've had it we did attend an RV rally in Phoenix, Arizona recently and all the coaches were parked in pretty tightly but at least we had good access to the sun but we were out all day attending the RV show and going to seminars so it was going to be unattended we were able to take a bicycle lock and loop it around the steps of the coach and onto the solar panel so it actually kept it affixed to the RV and safe from the risk of being stolen so we consider the Renegi Solar Suitcase a really great way to get your feet wet and to get started with solar we know people who have invested thousands of dollars setting their RV up with a solar solution only to find that A, they didn't really like boondocking they much preferred staying in campgrounds with hookups and B, their choice of RV didn't actually work out and they ended up switching it out but for anybody that's wanting to try solar out this is a really fantastic portable and affordable way to do it and even if you do end up deciding you want to do more boondocking and invest in a greater solar setup you can always still use the portable panel to maximize the raise during the day so overall we've been very happy with our 100 watt solar panel it was around $400 when we bought it on Amazon Prime and that was in March of 2017 for us that $400 has been a really good investment because we know that the reduced time in our generator it's going to end up paying for itself financially let alone having the advantage of not having the smell and the noise of our generator so we've been really happy with this because it's really light, portable and we love that everything's all included in its own little suitcase now you could probably buy some of these components and if you're really technical you could probably get a controller and get the junctions and put it all together but it wouldn't be in a polished nice little case with a handle that's easy to just stow in our RV or in our car to take with us and we just love that convenience and it felt that it was really affordable and will pay for itself in fuel savings on our generator so we hope you liked this video and found it helpful we've put a link to the product down below in the description so you can go check that out of course we'd love to hear from you get your thoughts, comments and feedback on this video down in the comments below don't forget to hit subscribe and come back every week to check out more videos from the Road View Reviews team every Wednesday we post new videos to help you gear up for your adventures so until next time, see you out there