DIY Portable Solar Generator - (515Wh Lithium 3S 12P 18650's)

what is going on you guys I'm back and I wanted to share with you one of my latest projects and what we have here is an solar powered generator that is based upon a custom-made 18 650 lithium lithium ion battery it's a 500 watt hour battery it's made out of these individual NCR 18 650 batteries about 36 of those it's configured in series parallel so we have 12 these in parallel and three of them in series so in total it's 500 watt hours this is the NCR it's 18 650b is rated at $3,400 hours at 12 point 6 volts it's 40 point 8 half hours approximately and again 500 watt hours the package itself is very light very portable it's just under 8 pounds it's seven point eight pounds to be exact I made this out of I guess what you would call an animal box small sized one it's watertight all ports here are weatherproof all the covers front the back side everything weatherproof it's not even waterproof it's gonna be weatherproof so light rain it'll be resistant to die what we have on the front here is four USB ports so before I do any of that this is the main switch here this is a 30 amp switch do you have a 30 amp breaker in here so that's the most you're gonna be able to pull out of this pack when I turn that on you'll see the main display comes on what this is here is a battery : a tur so what that means is it reads current it's not reading just voltage it's reading current and it uses that to check the state of the battery not only does it tell you the state of the battery but it tells you how much would already have coming out and how much a pal rehab coming in and it tells you time to depletion and time to full charge depending on which way the current is going the reason why I use that rather than a cheap voltage meter is because with the voltage meter to tell the state of a battery it's very inaccurate once you have it under load because once you have it under load the voltage sags and then it said it'll be off by like 30 40 percent sometimes depending on how heavy the load is right so it's kind of useless while in operation with this year what we're measuring is current in and out so depending on how much actual current is going out it tells you very accurately how many electron basically left the battery how many electrons come in to the battery and it's gonna tell you how much runtime you're gonna have left and that's going to be a very accurate reading now on to the front of this we have four USB charge ports here so each of these is independently switched the reason why I did that is to conserve battery so if you're in a grid down situation you're camping you're on a jobsite whatever it is if you're running off of battery it's probably because you have no other option right so that being said you want to conserve as much battery as you have available and you don't want to waste any of that so a lot of the Power Packs I've seen out there in the market today just by turning the thing on you're probably consuming about 4-5 watts just having it on doing absolutely nothing just sitting there what I want to show you here when I turn that on okay just pay attention to I don't know if you can see that on display but you'll see that it uses no watts it's using point 0 1 3 amps point 0 1 3 amps to turn it on ok so and really that all comes down to the solar charge controller that's inside here that's being powered on when I turn it on and this a little LED indicator light that's the only draw you have when it's our dog now if I want to turn something on because I want to use one of these ports you'll see when I do that I'll turn it on you see once power starts being drawn from the thing s ultra not another one so it's not enough area so once it detects the meter detects that there's power being drawn for me it'll light up again in case it's it's dark or whatever you can see the status of what's going on but that's a nice feature there but you see I can power them on independently I have four ports here for USB I have one 12-volt car port and I have one 110 volt AC wall adapter or a wall outlet there and that's being powered by ones they call ya power inverter sorry losing my train of thought here so we saw modified sine-wave power inverter I'm looking for a pure sine wave power inverter that can fit in this box this is being driven off of the hundred and fifty this port here is being driven off the 150 watt power inverter it'll handle a 300 watt surge so that power rating is perfect in terms of where I want it to be for this box but in terms of getting something that's pure sine-wave that fits in this box that's proof we have been more challenging okay so I'll show you what that looks like inside but one other feature I wanted to show you and that's one feature that I think is really lacking in most commercial devices of their solar generators like the yetis goal zero the anchor powerhouse there's a lot of devices out there that do similar functionality to what you see here but they're lacking and one thing that I think is very important and that's a DC to DC converter and that's what you have here so this is a DC to DC converter with an O LED display it'll tell you voltage and current and this is only adjustable all the way down from just under 1 volt up to 30 volts and it'll put out a maximum of 10 amps you have two knobs here this one will confirm control your voltage and this one will control your current limiting so if you wanted to explain to you why I think this is a necessary feature say you wanted to charge a laptop most devices today will use some sort of a wall wart adapter and that means you're going into the wall and then you're coming into the device with some sort of a barrel plug of some sort right when you are trying to do that off-grid with a battery solution like this you're gonna have to go from so this battery is twelve point six volts fully charged you'd have to go from 12 point 6 volts step it up to 110 volts AC and just by doing that you're gonna have a conversion loss loss of about thirty to forty percent just to bring it up to AC then back down into the power wall warts of the device it brings it down to I don't know maybe 19 volts for DC for a laptop and that's very wasteful right so you have thirty to forty percent right off the top that's not being used for anything besides losses as heat and in efficiencies in your conversion and you know if your again if your battery power durable you want to conserve as much power as possible so the most efficient way to do that is with a DC to DC converter and this one that I'm using here the name of the board escapes me but it's about 98 to 99 percent efficient within this voltage range that I'm using here when driven from about 12 volts okay so that's that's huge you're saving literally 30 to 40 percent power loss just by introducing caseta DC converter and it's not very expensive it should be in more devices I really haven't seen anybody DIY anything yet that has one built into their kit I haven't seen any commercial devices really that have one built into it so yeah I added it myself and I think that makes it very versatile coming along to the back here we have two ports so this is the solar charge port the rubber boot came off here but that's the solar charge port this is the DC charge port for the wall and both will handle at up to 10 amps because I'm using a solar charge controller internally to control that voltage okay so let's show you that AC to DC converter so we power it on you see there's an LED display I've got two knobs here one is for voltage control the other one is for current limiting as I mentioned previously so if you get a little closer so you could probably see that screen hopefully you can see that if I turn this knob that way you see the voltage is going down turn the knob the other way and the voltage goes up and that is totally seamless step up step down conversion with no gaps in between of coverage Yam from 1 to 30 volts and that is super useful in my opinion every device should have every device of this nature should have something like that it well yeah it's about 30 bucks to the cost of this bill but hugely beneficial okay so let's power that off and let's have a look inside this seat what's going on inside here ok so what you have here this is the board that powers the DC to DC conversion that's the switch these are what I should have mentioned before is you have three output options for the DC to DC conversion you have 2 barrel plugs here again with the weather plugs on them then you have East banana plug adapters or connectors and that's really good before alligator clips you can use it again like a bench power supply so again hugely useful so that's that's the board that drives that here you have a ten app solar charge controller this one is designed specifically for lithium ion batteries so it has that voltage proper voltage cutoff for overcharging and under charging you want you want it to stop that around like two point nine volts or three volts as a minimum low-voltage high voltage no more than twelve point six volts when you have three cells in series because that's four point two times three is twelve point six so anything above that and you want to get into a situation where potentially you can cause a fire and lithium batteries you really have to treat them well you have to understand what you're doing because lithium-ion batteries can get very dangerous very quickly if you don't know what you're doing so you don't want to connect that to a standard car battery charger because that's definitely going to overcharge it and cause some problems for you in here what we have is the 150 watt inverter again this is modified sine-wave and you see the connector is simply going right here we had a 30 amp breaker here again the entire system will allow up to 30 amps and that's that's perfect range for me so 30 times what 12.6 that gets you around three hundred and seventy something watts before you have to shut it down for a 500 watt our battery pack that's that's about right I see a lot of people have very small sized batteries like five like you don't have to kill a lot like like this one here or a thousand watts watt hour battery and then they add a huge you know inverter in a much bigger box that does like a thousand or 2,000 watts and you know that sounds cool but really if you're running off of battery it's for a reason right because you don't have access to a wall and if you're trying to power something like a fridge from a 500 watt hour battery that's not gonna last you very long I don't know how much of fridge is going to pull but I do know it's gonna run for an hour maybe two hours at that rate rate with this type of a battery you know if you just leave the fridge off for one or two hours you're gonna have maybe one degree drop in there huge waste of energy if you ask me so my my thinking is that you would use this as a power hub and you would become a lot more efficient in what you're doing so it's the powers out there's an ice storm or something storm knocked out your power you're in the dark you want lights for the kids kids maybe you want to watch a few cartoons or something on the tablet tribe's up the tablet try jump a couple flashlights whatever it is but you're being conservative right you're keeping things under 100 watts at a time and you know even at 100 watt draw five hour battery and theory is going to give you about five hours that's going to get you through any storm unless you're in something a little bit more serious in which case you want to be a little bit more conservative right so again that's that's my line of thinking with something like this but I think it's a good size battery or small emergencies and that is a good-sized power inverter so again if anybody knows of a small pure sine wave inverter that would fit in a box like this something about that size this is about two was it two and a half inches wide by about three inches long if you know of something that fits in that same footprint please let me know in the comments I'd very much appreciate that I would like to upgrade this I haven't had any any problems with it yet but you know you want cleaner power so modified sine-wave is not the best way to go but it's what I have for the moment here we have the BMS for the lithium-ion battery this is gonna it's gonna provide you with cell balancing so it's going to make sure that the cells are properly balanced when you're charging it's going to make sure that each one doesn't go too far above 4.2 volts it's going to make sure that each cell in in the sprint up three is matched closely to 4.2 volts if I'm ever in doubt of that I have this here I have an extra set of balance leads here okay so let's bring it a little closer so you can see my cells are pretty well balanced they're not out of balance right now so again you can you can always verify that with this device and I just leave that inside the box but the the BMS should take care of that for me okay so with that said let's close this up and we'll start putting some load on and show you what it can do so I think we're gonna start with is USB devices so powers out most people want to charge their phones so let's turn that on so you have a 2.1 amp and a 1/2 quart on each of these okay so what's and when I do that well it's already turned on but whenever you pull a little from this if the light is off on the display the light is gonna come back on to indicate that mode is being drawn from it and if it weren't dark you could obviously see what's going on with the battery so weird we're pulling current down we're pulling 10 watts not sure if you can see that with the light on but there's 10 watts being pulled to charge that battery so that's it's doing a full 2 amps there at 5 volts so 2 times 5 is 10 watts you got my wife's phone here let's charge that again we're gonna use the other two amp charge port so we'll turn that on that's a USBC connector and so now we have 17 watts being drawn from the battery to charge two phones not sure if you see that you've got a tablet here kids wanna play games battery runs low gotta keep the kids hobby right so how are that hard okay so it's not coming up to 24 watts do another tablet so you got two kids okay so we're now at 20 to 29 watts and not sure if you could see that so that's off of the front panel if you wanted to if you had more devices I can't see that you would but maybe you do you got the 12-volt car ports you can always buy an adapter that goes in there and adds the two additional USB chargers okay so let's use the AC output now so that's why I just turn that on so you're out in the heels you got some sort of power tools so you see that turns on indicators on now got a for a power battery let's plug that in there indicating that is charging that's a big load so now we're pulling about 141 watts out of the battery pack and what I want you to pay attention to as well is the current so we started I think at about forty point seven or forty point eight hours as we add load to that at that current drop about 140 watts it's saying that we have about four hours and seven minutes seventeen that's on that load of battery power left okay so that's a really handy feature okay so we're charging that we're charging work Pisces so you have a laptop you want to charge your laptop well I can't use that or you could you could you can add a know an extender on there but we want to use the DC to DC feature so we have this year okay so I got a bunch of these plugs here I got a DC cable here two barrel plugs on the end and for my particular laptop I'm gonna use this plug one end goes into there other end goes into one of these ports let's turn that on and my particular laptop needs 19 volts so we'll turn that down to 19 volts okay you got 19 volts there on the display look the other end of this into my laptop which I have here lights come on and you should see indicator showing that it's charging right there okay and while that's going on you can see here on the O LED display that it's dropped down to eighteen point five volts at about 0.68 amps okay and now are pulling a total of 79 Watts from the battery pack so obviously some of these devices have settled down in what they're drawing but that's a real-time display of what's being pulled so you can see I have four devices here five a laptop that's six tremendous amount of power at this rate you got six hours of power left six-and-a-half hours left the power at this rate if this were a real emergency the power was off you're not gonna be using this much power but if you were it's gonna last you the entire day so again very useful very handy most people should have something like this in their home maybe not quite this size but if you were to buy something like this in the marketplace today so I think the anchor power core is probably the closest thing to this without the DC to DC converter I think it has all the same ports as you know the four USB the power port and AC at about 150 watts that thing costs about I'm in Canada so it's about a thousand dollars Canadian with tax a little bit of you know probably above eleven hundred bucks Canadian or power but back up that's that's a lot of my I don't have that lying around that I can you know I have two kids I don't have that much disposable income so I built my own and I would say I put my wife is standing right there so I'm hesitant to see how much I spent on this but I think in terms of the battery let's let's do some math here for the NCR 18 650 B batteries I taught them at about $5 apiece there's 36 of them so five times 36 it's $180 so let's just call it $200 shipped from Ali Express to Canada that came from China obviously the are genuine NCR 18 650 b-cells they're very good cells in terms of what you can buy out there in terms of money dollar spent per one hour that's probably the most energy dense cost-effective battery that you can find today so definitely a good battery to use again the battery cost about 200 bucks the box itself I think I paid about seven dollars for this box this is a Flambeau case I think it's uh I don't wanna get this wrong but I think this is a French company it's Flambeau cases I'll put a link in the description where I got this case it's a really nice case it's weatherproof that has weather approved seals on the inside of it all these components here very inexpensive again pretty much everything I bought here who came from Aliexpress these are very inexpensive I'll give you a full price breakdown of everything but I think all in all everything in probably about $300 that I put into this $300 versus $1100 huge savings again the other thing that you get by doing it yourself if you know what you're doing is that if anything fails on this thing it's completely serviceable if you buy a an anchor powerhouse for example and I'll just keep on using that one as an example if you saw that thing there's a couple reviews on Amazon where somebody's torn it apart to see what's inside of it how it was built that thing is not user serviceable at all okay basically if something fails in there you better pray that your warranty is good you send it in they're gonna take care of you yeah there's a pretty good company so they probably will take care of people if you buy something cheaper maybe you're out 1,100 yeah so 1,100 bucks a lot of money to lose if you know you left it out in the rain or something kid knocked it over you know accidents happen right they'll take yourself you have an awesome project to do on the weekend you know it's rewarding to know that you've built something that you're actually using providing light to you and your family during an emergency it's reliable user serviceable and you know when you when you do things like this and you share with others obviously others can do the same thing to you so by all means guys use the parts list copy of this thing understand exactly the way I did it do your own thing whatever it is but YouTube is a fantastic community of people up here I like to share my projects i monetize my videos as well so it's one way to kind of fund my projects and continue to share my ideas and you know those apps pay for park or all of these expenses over time right so by all means guys share what you built just the safe about what you do okay so if you know are a beginner into electronics then you don't know the difference between series or parallel do some reading okay pick up a couple books there is such a thing as the library yes I know probably haven't been to one in a while but get some books buy some books on Amazon go online read and then read some more and when you're done reading read some damn more there is there's not enough to be said about knowing what you're doing when you're dealing with electronics particularly if you're going to dive into a project like this that uses lithium-ion batteries no guys this is half a kilowatt hour in like seven point eight pounds this is incredibly energy dense if you had to generate 500 watt hours of power you would get a sense of what that actually means right so there's a tremendous a lot of amount of power packed in this little box if you don't know what you're doing leave it alone you know ask somebody to help you who does know what they're doing but please educate yourselves guys don't do it half-assed because things can get very dangerous very quickly particularly with lithium-ion cells there's nothing wrong with them it's just they're very energy dense and when things go wrong they go along very very badly with that being said speaking of YouTube I got to tell you I've been watching a lot of videos there's a couple really good guys on here on YouTube that I've been following for quite some time Jehu Garcia one of them he's amazing he's been doing quite a few 18 650 battery builds he does stuff with cars he does power walls there's another guy I think he's in the UK HP power wall hope I'm saying that right he's done a lot of power wall stuff again 18 650b or sorry 18 650 cells he uses harvest this Delta cells from dead laptop batteries who else there's the average Joe average Joe he's doing some amazing stuff again power walls and again 18 650 batteries the thing I learned from all these guys is that you know they're they're all kind of feeding off of each other they're sharing what they've learned and they're showing you how to do things safely and one thing I didn't mention about this bill that I'm not gonna pull out the battery to show you what that looks like it's already shrink wrapped and nicely packaged but I will show you some pictures of the bill in progress some screenshots maybe right now all I'm talking each individual cell in this battery pack is individually fused so what that means is that unlimited the amount of current that can be pulled from each individual cell if there's ever a catastrophic failure of any one of those cells and it shorts out if you are just you know spot-welding one cell to another cell or using the gauge wire to connect the cells together things are gonna get very hot very fast your you know we have a small container like this in a confined space that's just disastrous right what these guys have done they looked at what Tesla has done with his battery packs in the Roadster the Tesla more or less Tesla's done using between the cells and that again allows you to limit how much current is coming out of it so for this battery pack here I used five amp fuse fast blow fuses on the glass fuses each individual cell is is limited to five amps personal 6 p.m. so okay total from the pack that you can pull before you have trouble I have a 30 amp breaker if that breaker were to fail obviously the cell fuses is going to save it so you have five amps if anything happens if there's a short the battery that fuse is going to blow and the point being is that that cell immediately it becomes disconnected from the pack that's critically important because if you have a short for whatever reason you want that self disconnected because you don't want that thing to continue to hold more heat into thermal runaway increasing the heat in the surrounding cells obviously disaster right so what Tesla is done ingenious but again very simple and for you to replicate that it's also very easy to do you know guys like Jane Garcia an HP power well average show they use thin wire that they have like tested that blows at a certain current limit that's acceptable for them for their power draw needs average Joe he's actually done some pretty extensive testing of different wires the fast blow glass fuses that I'm using in this thing so average Joe awesome work thank you so much for that God you saved me a ton of time and research with that so yeah guys if you're gonna do this do it safely right don't just spot-weld cells together particularly when you're working with 18 650 cells they're so energy dense you just want to limit what can go wrong and disconnect things immediately if they do go wrong right so with all that said I don't want to discourage anybody from doing something like this just do the same for the guys that's all again I'm not an engineer those guys are not engineers either but they've looked at what the real engineers out there like Tesla have done and they've replicated that right you don't need to be an architect to build a house but you can read a couple of books or talk to people learn things to build a shed or whatever it is right so we're not doing things quite as sophisticated as what Tesla is doing but we're using some of those concepts and ideas and putting it into something else that works for us a lot less complicated and yeah that's that's all there is to it right so whatever you guys learning please by all means put it back on YouTube share keep that community knowledge going because there's a lot of guys out there like myself who follow your work and we want to give back right so this is my way of giving back I hope you enjoy the project in between takes you know that I don't know like 30 40 minutes has gone by I think they're still connected so I just wanted to show you that while all that was happening so I think it's been about 40 minutes since the first day when I last showed you this screen but what I wanted to point out is that we still have thirty nine point one amp hours at twelve point six volts sorry that well one two bolts and quite a bit of time left and there's still ninety seven percent left on that battery right so this is finished charging it was all it was almost falling away but we still have workplaces going right so again just to point out this is gonna last another twenty eight minutes at that draw and it's currently still pulling 16 watts right so sorry about 28 minutes 28 hours 35 minutes that's quite different at 16 watts okay so very accurate power meter tells you what's actually going on right so I hope you guys liked this project if you do please like and subscribe share this video by all means leave your comments below any suggestions again I'm looking for a pure sine wave inverter something that is not much bigger than you know us I guess a credit card I know that's a big ask right like a credit card sized inverter I know that's why I haven't for this package yeah I've looked at some of those other four packages where they're longer like a PowerBar it has to be less than five inches long in order to in this particular case but if you find something like that please leave it in the in the comment section and I would greatly appreciate that I do want to move to a pure sine wave inverter it's just better to have cleaner power but that being said the modified sine wave inverter that I'm using here although it's very inexpensive I've had no problems at all charging power tools like this I've had no problems at all with the power adapter from my laptop if I actually am going out via this port from my laptop I've had no problems with LED lighting in my home so I don't see any issues with it the only place where I did see issues was with a my soldering iron I plug that in and all it does work but I do hear some buzzing so you'll probably see the same thing in fluorescent lighting as well so again it's better if you can use a pure sine wave inverter it's just cleaner power it's what the devices aren't designed to run on but for this particular form factor this is black cod now I can't show you I do have a pure sine wave inverter here this is a 300 watt one and if I do want to you know hold a larger load I can do that and I can just plug it into here and where's the switch bride shaina's on yeah so you see that turns on and this is a bit of a loud one this is the most inexpensive pure sine wave inverter that I've been able to find but again this thing is huge compared to my case right so that's not going to work for me 150 watts 120 watts something along those lines I think is perfect size for this size battery Oh too much damn noise and it give you a tremendous amount of power for a long time something that's reasonable right so about a hundred hundred fifty watt draw maybe a peak of like two or three other watts for a period of time that's what you should be looking at polling for a box this size at 500 watt hours right you shouldn't try to run your whole damn house off of something this size because that's ridiculous right and that's hugely wasteful so my philosophy with power outages and this sort of thing is that this will be a hub and I will use that power devices small devices small nodes over a long period of time and it will last a long period of time I'm just using lighting LED lights that like they average from five to seven Watts I think for most lights and that's the equivalent of forty to sixty watts incandescent that'll give me over fifty five hours of long time right even coming out of the AC port you can get more efficient with USB lighting but again choose your loads and something like this will be more than enough for what you need particularly if you're going camping or something like that where you don't have big appliances right this would be huge I have a telescope that my wife bought me this year and I plan to get into a bit of astrophotography so I'll need to run my laptop overnight for long periods of time this will do me just fine it has a go to mount so that's a motorised mount so that'll allow me to trust battery on that thing or run it right off of this thing pretty much indefinitely right so again one more thing I didn't show is the solar panel so I'll be right back in a second okay so let me show you the solar panel let me just get a couple of these things out of the way okay so this is a solar panel again I got this on Aliexpress we're gonna pay for this I want to say like 150 bucks this is a yeah it's a 65 watt solar panel and yes in here and comes with one of these things again very handy but I've got that built into my kit it also has a 12 volt output which is what I need for this barrel connector so I have the barrel connector input on this device so I can charge it with that a 65 Watts that's pretty decent amount of power in full Sun in one day worth of Sun during the summer time you could probably charge this from the zero pull and probably one day maybe not zero but you could probably get majority of the battery charge back up just the solar right on a nice sunny day so perfect size form factor about the same size of the case right keep these two things together in the trunk of the car what you can't be and you've got pretty much unlimited power at that point right so very useful very anything to have so with that said I think I've covered everything if you guys have any questions want to make any suggestions leave them in the comments if you like this video give it a thumbs up subscribe hit that little bell icon to get notifications when I put out new videos and hopefully you guys like what I'm doing okay so that's that I'll catch you guys later with the next project thanks

Channel: Joe Marques

Views: 92,725

Keywords: Solar Generator, DIY Solar Generator, Yeti, Anker Powerhouse, Ammo box solar generator, Solar power, 500 watt hour solar generator, Solar power generator, ammo box battery, diy battery pack, 18650 battery pack, DIY 3S battery pack, DIY battery bank, Yeti 400 Lithium, Kodiak Inergy, NCR18650B, 18650 battery, Battery bank, Emergency power pack, blackout preparedness, emergency power, portable power pack, flambeau cases, Battery coulometer, TK15 Battery meter

Id: ci8EW1c8o38

Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018