Distance since last post: 40km
Weather: Mixed, cloudy. Hazy. Warm 20-22 degrees
Notes: Feeling really good. No aches. Pushing harder today. Cant stop eating sultanas! The hills on each side of the Rhein are getting bigger!

Winter is coming…If you take notice of the geese that is. I saw a flock flying south (following the River perhaps) this morning and wondered if they knew something that I didn’t. Its was lovely and warm yesterday and its pretty much the same today. Is there some nasty weather around the corner or did they get an SMS from some Geese mates in Africa telling them to come early?

Although its been warm its been very cloudy today. Much cloudier than yesterday and yet I still managed to get some charge into the Li-Ion battery and (I think) something into the lead-acid battery. Despite that though I’m using my spare battery and thinking carefully how to use the UMPC more efficiently. Daytime use (like now!) is not the best as the backlight needs to be turned right up. That’s draining an extra 2 watts compared to evening use when I can drop the backlight to minimum.

I felt very strong this morning and powered the 85KG bike/baggage combo through to Mainz in much less time than I had planned. It was really enjoyable. While the clouds where thick I kept on cycling and ended up in Eltville where the was a lovely Rhein terrace restaurant serving Spargel Suppe (Asparagus Soup.) I stayed for an hour while the solar panel and bike rested by a tree and then layed myself down on a bench for an after-lunch nap. After buying, writing and sending a few postcards I carried on the journey. The Rhein-side path was pretty bumpy and at every chance I tried to find another route but this was really the only sensible offering, the other being a trek up to the hills! Then, after about ten minutes I heard a crash behind me and stopped as quickly as I could. I looked back to see the battery packs and cables strewn across the path along with the shattered container. Shit! I gathered it all together, repacked it and then checked everything out.I think I’ve been lucky. Everything seems to be working still so I think it was just a warning from above to tell me not to take afternoon naps!  

Only about 20km to go until the campsite and having looked closely at my plan, it appears that I’m ahead in terms of distance but behind in terms of energy capture. I need to take longer breaks. But no afternoon naps!!

Location: Oppenheim
Distance since last post: 68Km
Weather: Hot with 50% cloud cover
Forecast: Heavier cloud tomorrow. Clearing toward Thursday.
Notes: Problem with the Lead-acid battery today. It didn’t seem to charge. Will concentrate on loading the Li-Ion battery tomorrow.

Due to the cloudy weather I decided to cycle all the way through to the campsite in one stage today. I chose a route slightly away from the Rhein which had the advantage of being more direct but the disadvantage of being inland and therefore higher. Hills are not something I enjoy on the 25KG Kronan bike! The route was nice though and it took me through endless lines of grape vines (and loud, gun-like bird scarers going off every ten seconds all over the valley) that are almost ready for harvesting for wine. Every town and village seems to be advertising their Winzer (Wine) Fest!

The mobile phone I have is doing very well as my email notifier and as (filtered) emails come in I get a little beep telling me to stop and take a look. Its nice to be able to say I’m in the middle of a Vineyard’ at the end of each reply! But that’s about it for the mobile phone. Trying to do anything Web-like is slow and terribly inefficient. Firing up the Q1b UMPC every now and then keeps proving how perfect they are for Internet activities. There’s no way I would be able to write so quickly, create the maps, review and edit the images and communicate via IM through all the protocols possible without it.

I’m camped right next to a beach on the Rhein (that’s the Rhein behind me there!) and can hear the waves lapping against the shore. Every 10 or 15 minutes a huge river boat can be heard either coming down from Rotterdam or heading up from the south somewhere. Fuel, sand, containers and even the occasional passenger boat. The Rhein is a business river. I wonder how long it remains efficient compared to trains, trucks and air transport.

I haven’t planned tomorrow in detail but it won’t be as long a journey as today. The Lead-Acid battery I have (2.2KG worth of old technology) didn’t charge well and so I’ll concentrate on loading-up the Li-Ion battery. One bit of good news though is that the mobile phone charges from the solar panel even in bright daylight. If all else fails I’ll have to email the blogs via T9 but I hope that doesn’t happen. I still have a fully charged spare battery for the Q1b so I’m not in trouble yet!

Here’s a solution based on the Sunlinq 25w panel and a Xantrec 300 Plus combo lead-acid battery/inverter. Its very similar to my own solution apart from the fact that this one weighs nearly 10KG!!!

A number of blogs seemed to have picked up on this solution today and are quoting 11-12 hours charging time. This figure is a little misleading. The battery capacity is about 240w/hr and based on a reasonable 5-hour per day full-sun rate its going to take 10 hours. That’s a minimum of 36 hours duration! In middle-Europe, you’ll be waiting for 3 full days of sun!

The other point to consider is that you need to take all your AC converters with you (weight problem) and should recon on 20% energy loss by converting from 12v -> 110V and down to 12, 16, 19 or whatever voltage your device takes. Hardly efficient. Alternatively you can buy 12v car adaptors for all your equipment (can get expensive.)

My recommendation is to use a combination of a Li-ion battery with variable DC output (I’m using the TabletKiosk/Tekkeon MP3400) and a lead-acid battery (I’m using a 2.5kg 6Ah part) This gives you the best of both worlds (lead-acid flexibility and Li-Ion light weight) and cuts the total weight right down to under 4KG. At also avoids having to operate a dangerous 110v. Capacity with my solution is around 130W/hr but here’s the key. Don’t use a notebook PC, use a UMPC. They are far more efficient. With a normal UMPC you’re good for 10 hours of computing on a fully charged system (around 7 hours full-sun charge time.)

News Via GottaBeMobile.

In a recent comment here, someone asked why the Lead-Acid battery was needed. Its probably not too clear in the video why I use it so I reproduce my answer (which comes from the best of my knowledge!) here.

There are two main problems with charging Li-Ion batteries from Solar panels.

Firstly, Li-Ion batteries (in notebooks and battery bank) charge using a constant current (stream) of power. For common notebook batteries and battery banks such as the Tekkeon MP3400, this is around 1A. A lot of the 12V portable solar panels only reach this power at high sun levels meaning you can only use them for a few hours mid-day. In fact a 12W panel might not be enough to even start the charging process. Secondly, if you have a huge panel that could deliver, say, twice as much power as needed, its not used. Only the power needed is taken. The rest is wasted.

These two problems can be overcome at the expense of weight with a lead-acid battery.
L-A batteries are more flexible. You can charge them with a trickle and also with a higher charge rate. They are much more suited to pairing with a solar panel. The problem with this solution is weight. Small 12v L-A batteries are over 2KG in weight!

What’s needed is a flexible Li-Ion battery charging solution. Currently there are no products on the market that can archive this but I’m searching hard!

In summary there are 2 solutions.
1 – Get a panel powerful enough to charge a Li-ion battery at 70% of its rated output. For example, a 25W panel and the Tekkeon MP3400 Li-ion battery. This will give you about 4 hours of charge time on a sunny summer day.  (Mid-Europe) This should be enough to completely fill up the Li-ion battery.
2 – Go for a heavier solution with a L-A battery and give yourself more charging flexibility.

Lesson number one in the Solar-UMPC project is that the weather is chaos and if you live in mid-northern Europe, you can’t rely on it as a source of instant energy. You’ll see how I’ve had to adapt my solution in my first Solar UMPC video. In the video I present the solar charging and storage setup that I’ve decided to use for the tour. Its based on the fag-packet drawing I did a few weeks ago after deciding that Li-Ion batteries weren’t really the best solution.

I’ve introduced the lead-acid battery as a buffer and despite the 100-year old technology and 2.6KG weight, provides the perfect stabiliser to the whole architecture.

A quick rundown of the equipment I’m using (mostly bought from my home country, Germany.)

• Sunlinq 12v / 25W foldable solar panel.
• Sonnenschein 12v / 6.6Ah lead-acid battery.
• Solar charge controller. 12v / 4A
• Samsung Q1b UMPC.
• TabletKiosk MP3400 Li-Ion battery pack.
• Voltcraft dual-mode 12v battery charger.
• Voltcraft 12v DC-DC adaptor.

More pictures in the gallery here. Many thanks to SelectSolar for their help in preparing this solution.

Despite the terrible weather forecast (rain, clouds, heat, thunder) It’s time to finalize the pack-list and buy the last items, prepare the solar equipment (which should turn up today) and do some test loading and test cycling. Over the last weekend I fitted the baggage to the bike and loaded it up with random heavy items including the new tent, sleeping bag etc. There should be no problem with space or loading weight. I also tested out the tent and it seems OK although some dampness came through from the floor. Is that normal? I’m surprised.

I’ve written the pack-list in Google docs and shared it for everyone so you can always see the latest version. Its organized into sections. Feel free to take a copy for your own use.

View the pack-list here.

I will go through it and weigh each section before I go and add that to the pack-list. Despite the sub 1kg PC, it won’t be a light load! Here’s the list of electronic equipment I’m taking.

12v AA battery charger,12v charger for Nokia phone,12V lead-acid battery (70W/hr),Adaptor cables and tips, Batteries 8xAA for camera, Batteries (2xAA for GPS), Camera case, Camera USB cable, DC-DC adaptor, Digital Camera + 2GB mini-SD card, GPS logger and holder, GPS serial cable and USB-serial adaptor, Li-ion battery (56W/hr), Mini battery tester, Multimeter (voltage, amps, sun, temp), N800 (spare web-access kit), Nokia headphones / adaptor. , Nokia phone (6280) + 2GB mini-SD card, Nokia USB cable, Passive USB mini-hub, Solar panel (25W) +cable kit, Spare mobile phone (voice only), Standard UMPC battery, Torch, Tripod, UMPC (Samsung Q1b) + Extended battery, case + keyboard, USB LED Lamp.

Later today  I should have more details about the solar panel/battery to post. Pictures too.

The new tent has arrived, the bike baggage, and finally, some warmer weather so I’m taking the chance to test things out in the garden. My daughter is nearly asleep in the tent and I’m perched outside with the Samsung Q1b and organizer pack resting on one of my panniers, a clip-on LED lamp a paraffin lamp and a bottle of Germanys best beer!

This is the perfect time to be writing because its dark and you only need the minimum of backlight on the UMPC. As I write this with WiFi on, I’m taking between 6.5 and 8.5W on the UMPC. Its also wonderfully quiet.

Behind me, in the spare bedroom, I have started to lay out everything I need for the tour. I’ve written the pack list and there are only a few more things to buy before I’m ready to go. I hope it all fits into the panniers I bought for the bike which, incidentally, is going to be the blue Kronan.

A few things that haven’t turned up yet are the Lead-Acid battery and the solar panel. They should be here on Monday which will allow me to build the frame that the panel and battery will sit in on the back of the bike. I’ve ordered a could of panel meters too because I want to see what sort of drain each component puts on the panel.

One thing I was a little disappointed to find out tonight is that in theory, DC-DC conversion will cost at least 25% of my energy. That’s rather a lot to be wasting just to transfer energy, especially if I charge the Li-Ion battery from the 12V lead acid battery. I could lose an hours computing time just in that process.

I’ll finalise the packlist (V1.0) in the next few days and post it up. I’m also planning to do a video overview of all the equipment I’m taking, a picture-set of the bike and the charging setup and as many other images as I have time to take. The 9-day forecast is looking OK (not perfect, but OK) and so I’m quite confident that the tour will start at some point next weekend.

I’ve just had a nice conversation with my energy advisors, Select Solar, about some of the issues I’ve seen with the tests I’ve done so far.  The main problem being that Li-Ion batteries will not trickle charge. They require a certain level of stable voltage/current before they start to charge and this wastes the possibility of charging a battery at lower sun power. In fact, on a hazy day or with light cloud cover, the sun power might not actually go above 70% and you have no chance to charge anything. This could be  major problem and I’ve decided to try and address it.

A solution to this problem, as I mentioned before, is lead-acid batteries. These are the type you will find in your car and are a tried, tested, reliable and relatively cheap solution. The problem is that they are also extremely heavy – at least 400% of the weight for like-for-like power storage. They also operate at 12v which means voltage conversions (and more electronics and power-wastage) in order to operate the UMPC.

The decision I’ve made is to buy a 70W/hr 12v lead-acid battery (2200g) and to try and use this as a charge buffer. Here’s a little sketch of the planned set-up.

The idea would be that I connect devices to the lead-acid battery as the solar power increases during the day. For example, I might add a couple of AA batteries or my mobile phone in the morning. At mid morning I might replace it with the Li-On battery and during the peak hours I could re-attach the AA battery charger with 2 or 4 batteries depending on sun power.

Two problems I can see here:

• How do you know the charge on the lead-acid battery?
• Will the lead-acid battery be able to feed up to 1.5 Amps?

There’s only one way to find out. I’ve just put an order in for a 70W/hr lead acid battery and charge controller along with some fresh AA batteries, a powerbank tip adaptor for the Samsung Q1, a 12v charger for the mobile phone and something I’ve always wanted, a flexible USB LED-lamp!!!

Later today I will probably be ordering the solar panel. I won’t be using the P3 Panel as the only advantage with that was that it could drive 19V into the PowerBank. Now that I’m going for a 12V source solution I’m going to be looking at the 25W version of this Sunlinq panel which is the same price as the 15W version of the P3 panel. There’s a risk that its going to be too big for the bike at 1m long but even if I fold 25% of it away, its still going to give more power than the 15W panel and during mid-day pause and work sessions I hope to get the full 25W out of it.