How long will it take for a 12-volt, 60-watt solar panel to recharge a 12-volt marine battery?
Batteries are rated in units of Amp-hours.
A 12 Volt, 60 Watt panel makes 5 Amps of electricity, because Volts times Amps equals Watts.
So it depends on how many Amp-Hours capacity your battery has.
The Sears DieHard Marine Deep Cycle/RV Battery, Group Size 24M has a capacity of 80 Amp Hours. 80 divided by 5 is 16. That means that at 100% efficiently a 5 Amp 12 volt solar panel could charge a 12 Volt, 80 Amp-Hour battery in 16 hours. But it is never 100% efficient. You can usually count on using maybe 25% more electricity to charge a battery than you can get back out of it. So count on 20 hours. And that 60 Watt solar panel only makes 60 Watts maximum, when pointed directly at the sun on a clear day. If you have the panel mounted on a roof or fixed mounting that does not constantly turn to face the Sun like a sunflower does, it will make less than 60 Watts most of the time. So I expect it would take 2 or 3 days to charge up that battery from zero to full in a typical case. Use 2 or 3 panels in parallel to get 12 Volts and 10 or 15 amps to speed that up to one day. And as another answer said, use a charge controller between the solar panel and battery.
Solar panels stand alone 12 volt off grid
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