calicamper
Expedition Leader
More minor bits on the way from amazon. Then I start assembling this weekend.
The 50mm Ammo Box Solar Generator project.
- Thread starter calicamper
- Start date
Rumblefish_Pro
Observer
Not knit pick, but its a .50 caliber ammo can. 50mm would be significantly larger. I built a box similar to that with 2 10ah batteries in it using this video as a starting point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPs0hypsWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPs0hypsWI
Not to bust your bubble here, but the voltage is meaningless. You could easily have a 1 watt panel at 100 volts if you wanted-not that such a thing would be practical.
What matters is POWER. ie Watts. It's a 10 watt panel, and enough to maybe charge a phone here and there. It isn't enough to run a fridge or any significant power consumer. It is enough to trickle charge your battery-but at less than 1 amp. More realistically you'll get 0.5 amps on a good day. SO if your 18Ah battery is half discharged, it takes 18 hours of ideal sun to charge the battery. That's like 3 days of sun.
Still, you'll learn the basics of power management, and when it's time to upgrade, you'll know just watt to do. A bigger box, a bigger panel, bigger wires and a bigger battery and you can run a fridge indefinitely.
calicamper
Expedition Leader
First camping trip with the new power set up. Worked great considering it was the CA coast and we only had about 4hrs of full sun on two days. I added a second 10watt Renogy panel so two 10 watt panels paired with the 18ah deep cycle battery handled all our power needs. We ran lights as much as we needed and charged the cell phones and an Ipad both days. Current plan is to get the rest of my LED lighting installed only managed to get one strip built into the tent before we left. But it worked great no issues. The lowest we ran the battery down was around 12.3 Volts and the two 10watt panels had it back to 13.8 the next day by 2pm after three hours of direct sun. Given it was on Float status I plugged some other items in to charge up before the coastal fog rolled in. Wife really liked the improvements and is now supportive of all my time fooling about in the garage and getting Amazon packages every week. HA HA So time to finish it up and clean up some of the wiring a little.
Just a quick note, an iPad battery will last 2 days on its own with moderate usage. The fact your panels charged up the voltage quickly tells me you you mostly using the iPad battery, not your setup battery (it wasn't discharged very much so charged back up quickly). I have a 18000mah battery and it will charge an iPad from dead 2x times, so you have lots of backup there.
My point here is that it's a decent setup for your needs but be careful if you are going to rely on it for more than a few days. You haven't even really stress-tested the setup yet
Maybe drain your electronics and see how it works charging them from a dead battery. That will give you and idea on how effective your setup is.
My point here is that it's a decent setup for your needs but be careful if you are going to rely on it for more than a few days. You haven't even really stress-tested the setup yet
Maybe drain your electronics and see how it works charging them from a dead battery. That will give you and idea on how effective your setup is.