Green Energy

The building I live in has solar panels on the roof and a heat pump. This allows it to be more energy efficient than other buildings. It also has thick insulation on the walls and more. Recently I have been playing with Homeassistant and electricity Maps. Electricity Maps is a real time representation of energy flows showing which countries are using green energy as well as how much of that energy is currently green. In Switzerland as I write this it’s about 97 percent green.

Yesterday, out of curiousity I experimented. I charged both the Garmin Instinct Solar and the Garmin 45s with a solar panel. The first thing I noticed is that they were using 0.1 amps to charge, rather than 1, 2 or more amps of power. Until this experiment I had never considered how small batteries for gps watches are.

200 mah

According to a Google search the battery capacity of GPS watches is around 200mah. That’s tiny compared to the amount of power mobile phones and other devices have. This means that it’s easy to recharge the batteries on wathes like the Instinct, as long as you have a larger external panel or even a relatively low power external battery.