JonnyClickBait
New Member
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2022
- Messages
- 1
Greetings! Reading through these posts have been so helpful.
Yes, so I did a cross country road trip this summer CT-CA-CT and wanted to use a small solar system to recharge my electronics free from my car’s electrical system. So I used two Harbor Freight solar panels (25w x 2) and used the charger controller to charge up a few batteries from within the few UPS boxes in my apartment (perfectly light lead acid ?) I’m a photographer and just thought it would be cool to charge my camera/drone batteries via renewable energy and not strain my alternative (feel free to correct my thinking = battery weight on mpg vs extra gas usage to recharge stuff while I drive)
Only minimal success as I didn’t have the charger controller set to the right cut off value (too low) and recharge cap (also too low) and the batteries may have been over drained.
God! You don’t want to hear how I almost blew up my apartment with hydrogen sulfide from overcharging… another story for another time.
(Again feel free to tell me I’m making strange/bad choices. If an idea is inefficient or dangerous I’d rather know. I don’t want to align myself with the wrong cohort at the end of a Dunning Kruger case study.)
All this is to say I want to set up a tiny solar powered system in a tiny deployable plywood shack I plan to build on the roof of my (new to me) Forester. It has one of those huge retracting sun roofs so I can climb into it from within the vehicle. Is the best bet just using a few panels of the 100w system and just read the instructions for the charger controller carefully? I’d probably use it to recharge photo gear, probably run a fan and CB and maybe a small TV.
P.S. Thank God I didn’t put my 4 Prius battery packs into that Harbor Freight charger co troller… thermal marathons are not a sport I want to know about!
Yes, so I did a cross country road trip this summer CT-CA-CT and wanted to use a small solar system to recharge my electronics free from my car’s electrical system. So I used two Harbor Freight solar panels (25w x 2) and used the charger controller to charge up a few batteries from within the few UPS boxes in my apartment (perfectly light lead acid ?) I’m a photographer and just thought it would be cool to charge my camera/drone batteries via renewable energy and not strain my alternative (feel free to correct my thinking = battery weight on mpg vs extra gas usage to recharge stuff while I drive)
Only minimal success as I didn’t have the charger controller set to the right cut off value (too low) and recharge cap (also too low) and the batteries may have been over drained.
God! You don’t want to hear how I almost blew up my apartment with hydrogen sulfide from overcharging… another story for another time.
(Again feel free to tell me I’m making strange/bad choices. If an idea is inefficient or dangerous I’d rather know. I don’t want to align myself with the wrong cohort at the end of a Dunning Kruger case study.)
All this is to say I want to set up a tiny solar powered system in a tiny deployable plywood shack I plan to build on the roof of my (new to me) Forester. It has one of those huge retracting sun roofs so I can climb into it from within the vehicle. Is the best bet just using a few panels of the 100w system and just read the instructions for the charger controller carefully? I’d probably use it to recharge photo gear, probably run a fan and CB and maybe a small TV.
P.S. Thank God I didn’t put my 4 Prius battery packs into that Harbor Freight charger co troller… thermal marathons are not a sport I want to know about!
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