Project - Emergency Battery/Solar

[Riley-NZL]

Hi guys, 

 

Just wanted to share an small project I'm working on. I wanted to build an small battery/Solar system to keep important things charged and provide light during extended power outages. (never had one yet).

 

My requirements are pretty basic, be able to charge a phone or two, power some LED lights for a few hours and most importantly, charge my camera battery. 12V was the obvious choice for this, and seeing as most things can run for 12v cigarette lighters these days, my plan is to have a couple 12v Cigarette lighter sockets, then charge everything off those (My camera's battery charger runs of mains or 12V).

 

So here it is "mostly" completed. Two 12V SLA batteries, Solar charger controller, currently just have the one cigarette lighter socket. I'm also short the Solar Panel (which is fairly important). I got fpur 12V LED bulbs with roughly 4-5m cables on them, but they have bull dog clips on the end of them. I thinking of getting RCA sockets/plugs for these.

 

[Hackentosher]

What's the capacity of those two batteries?

[Enderman]

5 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

What's the capacity of those two batteries?

7Ah probably, the most common for that size.

[Riley-NZL]

17 minutes ago, Enderman said:

7Ah probably, the most common for that size.

 

23 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

What's the capacity of those two batteries?

Yes I believe they are in the 7-8 Ah range, picked them up 80% off at a closing down sale of a large electronics chain.

 

I've yet to test how long this capacity lasts (the solar charge controller has low voltage protection and will cut off the load when the batteries hit ~60% capacity. I'll be pretty happy if I can get 1-2 cell phone charges, and a camera battery charge and 1-2 hours of running the LED lights from them. I'm also aiming for an solar panel that can charge them fully in one day when there's a decent bit of sunlight, I'm hoping something around the 50W range should do this.