Solar charge

ItsMinJunLol · April 18, 2017

Hi. I am trying to build a solar powered charge station. I was planning for a 20W 12v solar panel with an MPPT solar charge controller, 9ah sealed lead-acid battery(12v), and a power inverter(12v). I have this kind of planned out, but I'm not too sure. I'm pretty sure that I have to wire the battery into the circuit and somehow get power from the battery, but I'm not sure how the wiring goes. If you look at the image, I've got the inverter wired directly to the battery inputs, but won't that mean it will also power the inverter too?. Please tell me how I'm supposed to wire all this up. Thanks!

Parts -

Solar panel (I can always get a 50W one)

Controller

Battery (it's for a UPS so I'm not sure what the difference is)

Inverter - Not decided yet. I only need like 50W of power.

P. S. I won't be using it constantly. Only at nights when my stuff runs out of charge

Mira Yurizaki · April 18, 2017

I would look into seeing if there's any DC-DC converters that you can use to convert 12V to 5V and have that output to a USB port. I dunno, to me it feels like it's more wasteful to go from 12VDC to 120VAC back to 5VDC.

EDIT: Obligatory safety advisory: make sure the battery has ventilation in the room. Charging a lead-acid battery can cause it to give off hydrogen and oxygen.

ItsMinJunLol · April 19, 2017

10 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I would look into seeing if there's any DC-DC converters that you can use to convert 12V to 5V and have that output to a USB port. I dunno, to me it feels like it's more wasteful to go from 12VDC to 120VAC back to 5VDC.

EDIT: Obligatory safety advisory: make sure the battery has ventilation in the room. Charging a lead-acid battery can cause it to give off hydrogen and oxygen.

I'll probably use it mainly to charge my mac, which accepts ~14V with 3a but I'm not comfortable just wiring it into a circuit so I'm just planning to use the magsafe. I might also buy one of those 12v solar usb power things to charge my phone via usb too. Maybe something like this.

Yeah I know they can give off hydrogen that's why I chose to go with a sealed lead-acid battery. Someone told me that if I'm going to go for lead-acid, go with sealed because I'm going to be sleeping in the same room (check out the links)