Do you charge your gaming laptop with solar?

I have a few big purchases coming up... a gaming laptop, and a solar system for my van.
I hear these laptops can use a lot of energy. Is there anyone on here who successfully keeps your gaming laptop charged? If so, what kind of solar set-up do you have? And how taxing is the laptop on your system?

What model laptop and how much solar? Approx hours of use per day? Other loads you have planned(electric loads)?

I would go with max numbers to figure out power needs. Having to much power is not a problem.

If it's a gaming machine, you'll probably want a good pure sine inverter to charge it with to avoid premature damage to laptop.

Hi Kenny,

The first question that comes to mind is how much power does it use? My laptop, although not a gaming laptop has a 95W 110V brick that plugs into the wall. I also have a 95 watt 12VDC power adapter for it so I don't have to use an inverter. There are losses in the power conversion from 12VDC to 110VAC and then back to whatever your laptop pulls. For just this it would take a 100 watt panel under good conditions to power it. I have 200 watts permanently mounted and another 200 watts that are portable. I also have 250 Ah of AGM batteries. Of course this is not my only load.

Your first order of business is to do an energy audit. Add up all the power you will be using and for how long. The sun doesn't always shine.

Not a direct answer though.

Get a Kill-a-Watt meter and play heavy-graphic games for a few hours.

Convert to AH on 12V, multiply by 1.2, and estimate hours per day to give you 12V AH per day.

Come back with some hard data and you'll get help with the calculations and a range of opinions.

The latitude and weather where you'll be located make a big difference too, obviously can't be parked in dark forests

Kenny P said:

I have a few big purchases coming up... a gaming laptop, and a solar system for my van.
I hear these laptops can use a lot of energy. Is there anyone on here who successfully keeps your gaming laptop charged? If so, what kind of solar set-up do you have? And how taxing is the laptop on your system?

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Kenny, this is a pretty general question you are asking. You do not mention how long each day you plan to game, which would play a large roll in my answer.

Still, personally I do a fair share of gaming and recently purchased an ASUS K501UW. I bought it specifically because of it's solid state hard drive over an old school spinning drive, to save some power. It also has the I7 processor and a Nvidia GTX video card, pretty much mandatory for modern games with any decent graphics level turned on. 

While playing a heavy game, my laptop will consume anywhere between 6 to 10 amps of power through the inverter, depending on my laptop battery charge state. That is effectively somewhere in the 80 to 120 watts of power, so not only would you need enough solar panels to bring that in, you need more to account for the real-world conditions. One and a half times more solar panels then what you are looking for is going to be realistic in the real world... so 120 watts of panel as a bare minimum and 200 watts as a realistic number. As reference: I have 300 watts on my van, and it keeps up with me playing (a couple hours a day) and working on my laptop (another 4-6 hours a day), as well as Kerri working on her laptop (8 hours), and the fridge. Before Kerri, I survived just fine on 200 watts with the laptop and fridge, but I rarely played games. 250-300 watts will give you some headroom for some play time... sometimes.

Now on to other problems that you have yet to foresee... A lead acid battery wont allow you to do this very often. I currently have a Lithium house battery which has one large advantage over a standard lead-acid battery - it will bulk charge pretty much up to 99% battery capacity. That means, during the middle of the day when the sun is high in the sky and I am gaming at 10 amps power use... I can regenerate that power pretty much on the spot, straight from the incoming solar. A Lead Acid battery will not! The charge controller will trickle charge it at only a fraction of what the panels are bringing in, until you go below roughly 80% battery. Only then does it go into bulk charging mode again, releasing the full potential of the solar panels. Once it goes up to 80-85% it drops back into trickle charge mode, and you bring in only a fraction of power again, and you will be using more then you are bringing in.

Basically, as long as you are gaming, you will never get back to 100% battery no matter how many panels you have and you will always be starting the next day at a huge deficit on power if you do not stop gaming and let the batteries recharge properly each day. Not to mention it will hurt your batteries over time. Remember, going below 50% battery for a lead acid is causing damage to it, so you would only ever have a small window (between 50 and 80% battery) to game.

Basically, even with a 300 watt solar array, and a good lead acid battery to store that power, you are realistically looking at 2-3 hours of gaming each day... tops... if that to be honest. Is that amount of gaming worth all the cost to you? Is it possible to game on a solar setup? Yes. It is realistic? Not really... at least not without spending $2000+ on a Lithium battery and 200-300 watts of panels, on top of your laptop cost.

My suggestion would be to pickup the laptop that you want, but save your gaming time for when you are plugged in. Coffee shops, libraries, and RV parks were the only times I gamed prior to the Lithium setup. You may want to think of limiting the bulk of your gaming to those times as well. Just being realistic.

I'm not a math wiz but I do know I make my poor craptop WORK playing World of Warcraft.  I can't remember exactly but the number 65 comes to mind and it's got a 17" screen.  A very generous member with a ginormous power plant let me plug in a few times including using his WiFi.  One day I played 8 hours.  It didn't even make a dent in his batteries.  Mind you, in the summer when the sun is right he can bring in a kilowatt.

If you don't have to limit your solar the sky's the limit.  I'm going to put together a similar system as my friend.  Keep in mind it'll cost but after his a/c, water heater and dc fridge freezer there's no reason why I can't have some of the comforts of home and that includes Warcrack.  In fact with his system used properly I could use my pc on it.

Van tramp

It doesn't matter what kind of battery you have, you can use the excess power that the battery isn't using to charge with. I turn stuff on as soon as the acceptance rate starts dropping in both FLA and AGM. At times I am running a A/C or water heater while still in absorb. In float I can see the full potential of my array before the voltage starts dropping. The controller just ups the amps it is putting outwhicj in my case can be up to 80 amps while the battery is sucking up nothing in float.

I have a high powered gaming laptop, the amount of power it uses of course is variable depending on if I'm actually gaming on it or just surfing the net, and also if it is recharging the internal battery. It can range from 60 watts to 300 watts if I have overdrive on and high performance mode. Basically, I run it during daylight hours. When I had 260 watts of solar it worked fine for that and general battery recharging on sunny days.

As the previous posters noted daytime charging/operation can be done without a drain on your battery. In good solar weather you should be able to plug in your lap top roughly noonish. Understanding exactly how soon you can do this depends on your system design including other loads and your battery bank.

Panel watt ratings are misleading. I figure on getting 50%. You will want to have more panel than just the lap top as those last slower hours of lower rate charging are important. Battery to run all night is substantial, having enough for a bad weather gaming day even more.

So just as an example, conservatively 200W average usage, 10 hours per day = 2kWH *1.2 = 2400 wH ÷ 12V = 200AH.

Yes that's a lot, but I know lots of gamers play more than that, there are bound to be other loads and not all days will be sunny.

So for that 2 pairs of 6V GCs for 400+AH storage (half that usable) would usually go higher but I think we've already over-estimated.

600-1000W panels.

If a Kill a Watt shows average watts usage is half that, or OP swears they only plat 4 hours per day max, or especially if both are true, cut the above in half.

I had no idea that laptops could churn thru that much power!

If you could recover the waste heat and pipe that into a slow cooker you could make some stew at the same time....

I know it is dependent on the laptop, but what is the battery life (not AC connected), in ballpark terms, of these gaming laptops while playing games? A few hours? or are we talking less than an hour? Like tx2sturgis, I had no idea these laptops took so much power...

Very dependent on how much the software used exercises the dedicated graphics processor (GPU).

They've made portable gaming rigs with multiple screens.

Not designed to actually use on batts that way, just saving the state of play between LAN parties

OP read Jim in Denver's sig. It was his power plant I was plugged into and yes it was during daylight hours. If I'm doing something special and am playing with friends I can easily get into the 12-14 hour range hence my desire to also have a power plant. Especially now that I have the wifi that will support my gaming indulgences.

You realize that your computer was just part of what was run on those days. My 12v fridge, hotspots, booster, and my computer are a bigger chunk of power than your gaming computer.

Wabbit said:

If it's a gaming machine, you'll probably want a good pure sine inverter to charge it with to avoid premature damage to laptop.

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Or charging from an automotive charger (usually 12v --> 19v) for less money and more efficiency.  Hopefully with a better connector on the end than a ciggy plug.

I've been happy with my recent experiments with Anderson Powerpoles.

A really good modern gaming laptop going full speed (like newest gen 1st person shooter games) is going to pull ~200-280 watts, about 16 to 24 Amps, which a ciggy lighter socket can't handle anyways (15 amps or less max). Figure a 100 watt panel is going to put out approximately 6 amps during usable daylight.

> charging from an automotive charger

The stock ones don't go that high.

Not rocket science to get a DCDC converter at high enough amps once you know the required voltage, but a little fiddly to get the power jack size and polarity right.

But yes in this case **much** cheaper and more efficient than getting a decent inverter.

Absolutely, APP connectors are the way to go.

And if well insulated, the living space doesn't need any other heat sources even camping in the snow, getting rid of excess heat is one of the big design challenges with that type of rig.

John61CT said:

The stock ones don't go that high.

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An excellent point, thanks for catching it.  

Maybe base it on something like this?  As you say, no way to get a PSW inverter for it at this sub-$40 price.

[img=150x150]https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/518j0N-h8oL._AC_US218_.jpg[/img]

Dunno.  At the much-lower power levels I run for laptops I use off-the-shelf DC chargers.

As an aside:  I don't have anything like a gaming laptop but I did recently buy a new, low-end quadcore Asus laptop off Gunny (former member here) who was frustrated with it after a few weeks.  Disinfected it of Windoze 10 and installed Debian with a minimal GUI .  It runs my only game (minecraft) at 60FPS at my preferred (somewhat reduced) video settings, off the OEM 33W power supply.  <-- not a typo  Normal games would make it explode, I'd guess.

My other lappy is a 7yo business class dualcore/quadthread Dell. Nearly indistinguishable benchmarks from the new cheapie but uses 90w.  Guess which laptop stays in the campervan now...

Yes newer hardware keeps getting more power-efficient, especially the mobile CPUs

Disabling any add-on GPU, or buying one only with the one built into the CPU helps a lot, as does getting away from spinning HDD.

Lotsa RAM's worth the hit though less needed for *nix.

____
The advantage of avoiding an inverter is not saving up-front money, but gaining energy efficiency, IMO worth paying more for that.

If I needed a DCDC boost converter I'd be sure to get adjustable for flexibility, probably a few different bare modules (no case) from Shenzhen and test carefully before putting into production.

e.g. https://m.ebay.com/itm/1500W-30A-DC...upply-Module-In10-60V-Out-12-90V/173173295122 , or

https://m.ebay.com/itm/1500W-50A-DC...ly-Module-IN-10-5-60V-OUT-15-70V/252553726589