Licitti Heavy Duty AC Power Box
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Rednecktek
Solar Wizard
Curiosity, what was the price difference between just getting the unit with the 1200w inverter built in VS adding in the 700w on top?
tim0shel
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I have their DC box and did some modifications to it. I would say for the price it was ok and I probably could not have built it like from a project box and parts for what I paid.
https://www.licitti.com/product/dc-control-box/
Mine - Added different SB50 plug for input (Yellow) and added the smaller PP45 connectors that I had to rewire and do cutout in the box for.
https://www.timshelnut.com/Electronics/Solar-Power-Generator-/i-JHS6S26/A
https://www.licitti.com/product/dc-control-box/
Mine - Added different SB50 plug for input (Yellow) and added the smaller PP45 connectors that I had to rewire and do cutout in the box for.
https://www.timshelnut.com/Electronics/Solar-Power-Generator-/i-JHS6S26/A
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About $75. If I didn't already have the Inverter, I probably would have just gotten the box with the Inverter built in. But, at least one commenter on YouTube said the Inverter's voltage was too low and would drop even more under a load...
Rabbit
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Just an update... I'm still happy with mine. I don't use it a ton as a portable power station, but it's still doing me valuable service every single day just sitting there wired in via the Anderson connectors as part of my pre-existing solar battery bank, in a way no "normal" solar generator ever could. I hope Licitti (or someone) comes out with a very similar product for the new 100ah mini-sized batteries. That'd be better still, but I'm not holding my breath.
kevin.riley
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Nice update, have you thought about shunts and testing a higher solar controller with it? I have one and running it through it's paces.
Rabbit
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I already have a small off-grid setup for hobby use at my house with a 1200-watt array, so mostly what I do with the Licitti is to leave it connected to serve as part of my main battery bank via the large Anderson nearly all the time. In practice this bank is almost always either fully or pretty near fully charged. So when I need the Licitti for use I just unplug it and go, then when finished I recharge it using the 12 to 12 charger mentioned in the thread above and reconnect everything when the bank is full as well, so that the charges are very close to matched. I generally only use the Licitti when traveling and never with its own solar, mostly for boiling a couple-three cups of water now and again on the side of the road and to have with me to provide backup power in an emergency for a CPAP I badly need, and recharge it from my cig plug as I go. This just about keeps up with my normal usage. The Licitti never comes even remotely close to a full discharge even on prolonged trips, so all I really need is to check the voltage now and again even though I'm fully aware of how imprecise this is with LiFePO4. Frankly, if solar wasn't a hobby I probably couldn't justify owning a portable power station at all-- a much-cheaper alcohol stove used to boil my water for me just fine, if a little more excitingly sometimes. So... I leave things like shunts and larger controllers via the Andersons on Licittis to others; I have my main system if I want to play with that sort of thing. I like to "Keep it simple, stupid!" as much as possible when on the road, which is why I found the Licitti so appealing in the first place. What matters to me is that it _works_, which so far and within the context of my larger system it absolutely and very much does. This is my fourth solar generator. My first was a complete disaster, my second was okay but clunky and a friend needed it worse than I did, my third was almost as great a disaster as the first, and this is the first one it's been a genuine pleasure to own and use.
4N6Guy
New Member
Hi Rabbit. Brand new to solar. I have nothing except what’s on my gate opener. I’ve been looking at the Licitti. Mainly for camping but also to augment lights during hurricanes. The more I do that, the less generator I run. Question…can you mix/match batteries? I will be using a deep cycle walmart battery. I also have an AGM battery out of my car. Can I hook up both? The Licitti website doesn’t have that info that I can see. Also, what is the max size solar panel I can hook up? I think I read 130W. Thx for you help.I don't see any other mentions of this device on this forum, so here goes...
I've-- thanks largely to Will Prowse-- been happily running a small home solar power system as a hobby for years now, and friends come to me for advice. Recently one was looking for a solar-generator type power box, so I did some fresh research in order to help. Along the way I found a radically new approach to the matter that intrigued me so much so that I bought one for myself even though I don't really need it, the Licitti Heavy Duty AC Power Box. Because it's so fundamentally different than everything else out there, I thought I'd mention it in this forum.
As I see it, this device in some ways isn't even really a solar generator at all. It looks to me like a fisherman's battery box with a solar controller and inverter added. For many years now fishermen have enclosed their trolling motor batteries in rugged, heavy-duty and specialized "battery boxes" that are often festooned with Anderson, USB, and cigarette-lighter-type power connections. The Licitti begins with this same concept and form factor, but adds a 1000-watt pure-sine inverter and a (very!) small solar controller to create a tough and (to some) "primitive" power-supply unit. All one has to do is add any standard-sized "drop-in" 12-volt lithium or even lead-acid battery to have (with one notable caveat, see below) a fairly competent solar generator. But what's even more remarkable than the ruggedness is the price. I paid about $225 (I forget the exact amount) for this thing (minus battery) delivered! (You can find a couple affiliate discount links on You Tube, if you search "Licitti" there. I don't get a dime; none of these Tubers have ever so much as heard of me.)
As near as I can tell the Licitti works great (and I'm certainly much happier with it than at least one and maybe both of my two Bluettis). Setup was idiot-easy, I've been able to pull 1100 watts sustained from the supposed 1000 watt inverter, and the display (while small and extremely primitive) does all it really (IMO) needs to. Bluetooth? Don't make me laugh. This device is the very best of bare-bones basic; the simplicity and lack of frills is one of its most powerful virtues. The Licitti adds very little weight to the battery, so this is about as light and portable as a 1200 watt-hour solar generator is ever going to be. But the main reason I like it so much (other than the super-good price!) is that it's designed for how I actually want to use a portable power station in the real world. There are multiple Anderson connections, for example, including one 175-amp plug that I can use to attach another battery (or even a daisy-chain of batteries) for more capacity, _very_ cheaply. I can also use this same socket to connect the unit's battery into my current home-solar setup's battery bank, so that I'm getting value out of the most expensive component of the system (the battery) every single day. In fact, setting things up this way even makes another 1000-watt inverter available in the home system at the push of a button. If my battery goes bad the Licitti will still work just fine with another one, or if the Licitti goes bad I still have a perfectly good drop-in battery-- try that with any other solar generator. With them, generally, if any one component goes bad you can't easily replace it. I mentioned the tiny, primitive display earlier. My take is that I can worry less about the device banging around in the back of my truck, because the display (being so small) is much less likely to take an unlucky impact and shatter than on a more conventional solar generator. Being based on a fishing-boat lineage, the Licitti is innately _much_ more robust than most designs. The casing is designed for a degree of abuse, unlike the delicate "mainstream" style of solar generators. I think you could wallop this thing with a hammer a time or three in a lot of places and the only damage would be scuffing.
There is one important for-sure caveat and one potential caveat I must mention here. The for-sure caveat is that, as delivered, the Licitti can be charged only by a solar panel inputting into its tiny, 100-watt capacity controller. (They say it's an MPPT, but I've never tried mine.) If you want to charge any other way you have to provide your own external charger, which can be plugged very conveniently into the multiple Anderson connectors provided. (Or, you can just attach another battery of the same chemistry via the 175 Anderson and charge _it_.) I already owned both a small AC and DC to DC charger fitted with Andersons, so for me this was not a significant problem. Or you could use another larger solar controller and an Anderson to attach however many panels you like right up the battery's capacity to accept charging. (Or then use the 175-amp Anderson to attach more batteries and charge them as well, if you like. This setup is _flexible_.) Again I see this absence of internal chargers as at least in some ways an advantage, as if a charger fails it's easily replaced instead of crippling the whole unit. The other potential concern I have is really an unjustified one, that I hope someone who reads this and buys a Licitti will remedy for me. This unit costs only around $200, and even "naked" pure-sine 1000-watt inverters cost a lot these days. Is the inverter actually pure sine, as claimed? I have absolutely no reason to doubt Licitti's word on this. Everything they've claimed that I'm equipped to verify checks out, and I corresponded a bit with their US rep via e-mail over a shipping issue and was treated exceptionally well and courteously. I don't own a scope, however, and know of no other way to verify for sure that the inverter is pure-sine. Nor have any You Tubers to date, that I'm aware of. In my personal usage it's pretty easy for me to simply treat it like it's not, however, so that's what I'm doing until I can find a way to make sure.
Bottom line... I love this thing for its ruggedness, simplicity, light weight, versatility, modularity, low cost, and perhaps most of all because I can link it into my existing battery bank and get continual daily use out of my investment. It's also perfect to toss into the back of my truck while traveling or doing work that might require AC power, and has become perhaps my favorite solar-toy to date. I've only lightly used it so far, but it's so cheap that if I get two years out of it (and the battery is still good, which it should be) I'll have zero reason for complaint. I only hope they'll someday come out with a version that's got a 2000 watt inverter. That would be even better.
Rednecktek
Solar Wizard
Yes, you can parallel up all the lead acids you can stand to pack around as long as you have an Anderson on the end to connect to the box. Just don't try to mix & match chemistries like Lead Acid and LFP for example.
It's a 10a SCC in there ( I wish I could find a bigger one that would physically fit) so you're only going to get about 150w out of it. I ran mine camping on a pair of 100w panels and it never complained. The 45v PVInput is the biggest hurdle. My panels were 23v VOC so parallel it was.
It's a 10a SCC in there ( I wish I could find a bigger one that would physically fit) so you're only going to get about 150w out of it. I ran mine camping on a pair of 100w panels and it never complained. The 45v PVInput is the biggest hurdle. My panels were 23v VOC so parallel it was.
Rabbit
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You probably can hook up both of these batteries together because both are basically lead-acid. (Mixing battery chemistries, like for example lead acid and Lithium Iron Phosphate, is however a Bad Idea.) But I wouldn't in this case, because there's more to it than just chemistry. Lead acid batteries are built differently inside when they're meant for different purposes. A car battery is meant to discharge "hard and fast", while a deep-cycle lead acid battery is meant to discharge "slow and deep". The differences inside that you can't see are both profound and important, and trying to use a car battery as a deep-cycle more than a time or two will damage it severely. Even just once or twice does a small amount of damage. You may also perhaps not know that discharging a lead-acid battery more than about halfway, whether it's deep-cycle or not, also damages it. Lead-acid batteries are in essence obsolete at this point, due to multiple inherent, inescapable disadvantages like this. The only purpose they still serve well is to crank engines, which for reasons it'd take me a long time to explain is a job that lithium still is unsuitable for. My advice is to just go ahead and bite the $350 or so bullet and buy a cheap 100 ah lithium iron phosphate battery from the list of those recommended on Will's website. You can discharge a lithium iron phosphate battery all the way without damaging it, it'll last through probably ten or more times as many discharge cycles, and probably will be good for ten or more years in real-world use. In other words, it'll probably outlive a lot of vehicles and power tools; this is a long-term purchase and should be viewed that way. To get the equivalent amount of power out of lead acid batteries (without damaging them) you have to buy _two_ 100 ah plus a set of pricey cables to connect them, and the last time I checked lead-acid batteries of that size ran about $100 apiece. So, it's really not as much more expensive as you might think to buy lithium iron phosphate. Besides, a lithium battery is roughly half-- sometimes less-- the weight. You're going to have this thing around for years, and will probably find a hundred uses for it (often it's easier to use a solar generator than run a long extension cord for a power tool, for example) besides hurricane prep. So... Again. I _definitely_ recommend lithium iron phosphate, also sometimes called LiFePO4 or LFP.
As for your solar panel... I have never actually used the solar function on my Licitti for reasons explained in the thread above-- I get my free solar input by other means. But... You can do a thing called "overpaneling" to a certain extent if you wish to. A solar controller can only accept so much input power, and that amount is listed in the device's specs. My guess is that if you stumbled across a 150 watt panel, you'd be okay with it-- the built-in controller would simply reject the extra input. But if you go too far in that direction eventually you can overheat and destroy even a top-brand, pricey solar controller. (Don't ask me how I know.) The big thing is that I'd look for a "12 volt" panel of 150 watts or under. "12 volt" here is a nominal term-- it doesn't actually produce 12 volts. Linked below is a moderately-respected name-brand example. Note that "hard" panels like this are much cheaper than the ones that fold up, and much more durable and longer-lasting as well as a general rule. There are cheaper brands of panels on Amazon that are probably just as good that I'd also personally buy without hesitation. But, this is a brand I know and trust. You'll probably want to purchase some suitable "extension wires" with the correct fitting as well, so that you can locate the Licitti in one place (perhaps even indoors) and the panel some feet away.
https://www.amazon.com/RICH-SOLAR-Monocrystalline-Efficiency-Module/dp/B08NDKHP9V/ref=sr_1_3?crid=MPNLQONJY6R0&keywords=150+watt+solar+panel&qid=1687041130&sprefix=150+watt+solar+panel+,aps,107&sr=8-3
One last thing... I have lived in Florida for a few years now, though I'm not a native, and am therefore no stranger to hurricanes. You will probably also want and need a wall-charger for your Licitti, in part because hurricanes block the sun and you'll need a 110-volt charger to recharge from your generator. While any 12-volt battery charger will work for a LiFePO4 battery so long as the battery doesn't go entirely dead, once that happens you'll either need a dedicated, "designed" LiFePO4 charger (I suggest one in the thread above) to restart it, or you can "jump" it from any 12-volt source just like a car. This is a good thing to know and understand going in. I've never had one go completely flat on me, and hear it's pretty uncommon. But it can and does happen. Also note that you may want to purchase an Anderson adapter of some kind for your charger-- again, see the thread above.
Also... I sense a need to keep to a budget here. If you want to go _super_ basic and don't mind connecting a few wires, learning a few relaitvely simple new tricks and maybe a little inelegantly-designed home-made-from-scrapwood ugliness you can save at least a small amount of money by making your own setup out of components. If you skip the solar-- doable, IMO, for emergency and around-the-house use since you have a generator-- you can cut costs. If it were me I'd start off by buying a LiFePO4 battery of whatever size I could afford. (Yes, even under severe budget pressure I'd not use lead acid. The advantages of LiFePO4-- and there are many more than I've listed here, like much-faster charging-- are simply too great to pass up, and lead-acid just isn't a bargain anymore no matter how you measure it.) Then I'd shop for an AC inverter, searching Amazon and browsing You Tube until I learned enough about them to decide intelligently what size I need and know what size the battery can support, and to decide if I really need a pure-sine inverter or not. (Pure sine costs significantly more, but is much safer for appliances and, especially, electronics.) Then I'd buy correctly-sized wires and a fuse to connect the inverter to the battery, use an existing 12-volt charger I probably already have and my generator to keep it topped off, and call it good enough for this year. Then next year I'd add a solar panel or three and an appropriate controller, and maybe (if you're having as much fun with this as I do) another battery and larger inverter as well. The next thing you know, you'll be recharging your tool batteries or laptops or whatever every single day on solar, and you'll be off and running making more and more of your own free power. Even better, you'll be in _control_ of all this. If something breaks, _you_ will be able to effortlessly diagnose and fix it. Not someone else. _You_.
Good luck, and may the swirling death-storms avoid us both!
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4N6Guy
New Member
A lot of good info. I appreciate you very much.
Rednecktek
Solar Wizard
While they're super convienent, especially if you combine a box with a DIY battery, they're pretty pricy. Granted, you can always ping @Will Prowse and ask. Knowing for a fact you can get a 304ah battery and 150a JBD BMS in there does make a huge gain for the 1kw units. The 2kw and 3kw might be a bit harder to physically cram everything into just because of the way the tray slides. The price for the 3kw case for example is pretty steep for the components but the small form factor really makes it shine compared to a "milk crate build" version.
One thing I wish Licetti would do is offer the larger MPPT controllers as a replacement part. I'd love to pull out the little 10a in my two and throw a 20 or 30a inside there instead. Currently I'm just building a dongle with an Anderson, a 20a HQST (in the spare parts bin), and an extension cord so I can throw more panels on mine once it's all set up in the camp kitchen. The 150w limit for the very little time we get sun through the trees just isn't enough to make it the full 10 days of our family camp trip.
Rabbit
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For what it's worth, I think the 1kw Licitti box is a flat-out bargain if you can accept its limitations (like the 10a MPPT Rednecktek cited above). With the larger ones, I'd probably build out my own system from standard parts instead. This is due to cost factors, weight (if you build your own it can be designed to break down into multiple easy to move sections) and also the fact that if something breaks on a system you've made yourself you can easily replace just that one single component. The 1k box is cheap enough for me to shrug and simply throw away (keeping the battery) if after a few years something breaks. The larger units, not so much.
That said, I just bought a 1k Licitti and a 100 watt hard panel as a gift for an old friend, and he set everything up yesterday for the first time. He's a complete solar novice but is handy, and loves it. Now he has at least some limited AC power in his garage, where he had none before.
That said, I just bought a 1k Licitti and a 100 watt hard panel as a gift for an old friend, and he set everything up yesterday for the first time. He's a complete solar novice but is handy, and loves it. Now he has at least some limited AC power in his garage, where he had none before.
What are you guys using for a charger?
I am thinking about 20amp charger to the large Anderson port which is wired straight to the battery.
At least I think it would work. A MPPT to that same port should also work for more solar input.
I am thinking about 20amp charger to the large Anderson port which is wired straight to the battery.
At least I think it would work. A MPPT to that same port should also work for more solar input.
Rabbit
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Anything the battery, connector, and internal wiring can handle ought to work. I'm never in any hurry and have a cig lighter socket in the bed of my truck, so I just keep it topped off there with a DC to DC charger when traveling. I don't use much power on the road, and this works well for me. At home, I connect it to be part of my solar bank with the big Anderson. I never actually in practice do AC charging, but keep a small, cheap charger with an Anderson connector around in case the need ever arises. Links can be found in the discussion above.
Nevermind. I found the one on their website.
Rednecktek
Solar Wizard
I grabbed a 40a SCC and wired it up with a 50a Anderson connection and some MC4 pigtails so I can put a real solar array on it. The biggest drawback to those boxes is that worthless 10a SCC built in.
Regarding the built-in SCC...
I saw a comment on one of the YouTube Videos that said it was pre-programmed for GEL batteries with no way to change that. Somewhere along the line, I read a comment that it was a Newpowa SCC and that the remote control could be purchased directly from them. I did that and surprise, surprise, I discovered my SCC was already programmed for LifePO4 and had all the correct charge settings!
For me, I will be using this mostly for either short weekend trips to our cabin or for power outages at home. I was happy to not have to wire up another SCC to it and the 10A will be fine with my 100AH Bat and my single 100W panel that I was wondering what to do with
I saw a comment on one of the YouTube Videos that said it was pre-programmed for GEL batteries with no way to change that. Somewhere along the line, I read a comment that it was a Newpowa SCC and that the remote control could be purchased directly from them. I did that and surprise, surprise, I discovered my SCC was already programmed for LifePO4 and had all the correct charge settings!
For me, I will be using this mostly for either short weekend trips to our cabin or for power outages at home. I was happy to not have to wire up another SCC to it and the 10A will be fine with my 100AH Bat and my single 100W panel that I was wondering what to do with
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