Easy DIY solar charging electric bike guide

[Music] hey everyone mike here with ebikeschool.com and today we're going to take this electric bicycle and turn it into a solar powered electric bicycle now this project is going to be something of an exercise i'm not really intending to leave this as a solar-powered bicycle but rather i'm preparing for a bigger project because i don't know if you guys heard about my little electric mini truck from china i made another video about that maybe you saw it but that is a project that i'm excited to work on because i'm going to take a solar panel put it on the top of that and turn it into a solar powered electric mini truck the thing is though i've never done a solar project on something that big so i'm going to start on a vehicle that i have a little more intimate knowledge of an electric bicycle i'm going to turn this into a solar powered bicycle and then assuming that works i'm going to take that hardware and just port it over to the truck basically and hopefully it's a pretty easy setup so we're going to start today by turning this bike solar and let's get to it all right now let's see what i'm working with i got a couple panels from renegy here they're both 50 watts um and these should be you know like top the line panels so i think it's going to work well i went with 50 watts basically just because the physical dimensions were about the size of the top of my truck cab and so i'll be able to put a 50 watt panel up there and just sort of trickle charge it i got two different ones one's the flexible panel and one's the rigid panel here's the rigid panel and i just didn't know which one was going to work better so i decided to get both and play with them and whichever one i don't use on the truck i'll just have as a spare so here's the rigid panel specs on the back 50 watts 22 volts 2.9 amps weighs 7.72 pounds or three and a half kilos so this looks like it's going to be a pretty nice option but i also thought maybe the flexible panel might be good just because it'll have a little bit of give to it so we'll have to uh play with it and see let's get that one open and since they're both basically the same power it doesn't really matter to me all right so flexible panel it's also got these mc4 connectors basically same specs 50 watts 22.6 volts 2.9 amps uh 2.87 pounds 1.3 kilos so should be like half the weight less than half the weight oh yeah so the flexible panel is way lighter so uh i don't know if that's going to matter too much for my project the truck already weighs like 800 pounds but it's impressive the same power here the rigid panel weighs like over twice as much so for these i think i'll basically be able to set up on this electric xp bike here this bike has the cargo package on it so it's got racks and baskets on the front and back and they'll make kind of like a perfect platform for putting these solar panels on here now obviously this is a little bit silly like it it can work of course but a you're covering up your baskets for utility and b it's just like a lot of unwieldy panel out here so this is more of like an exercise to see what's possible but i think we can still set it up and make sure this thing is a functioning solar powered bike and then the last piece of this puzzle is i got this mppt charge controller from ebikes.ca green technology and this thing should be able to give me exactly what i need in terms of the output voltage it's programmable so i can dial it into the 54.6 volts that i'll need for this 48 volt e-bike then i can use the same thing to dial in the voltage to i think it'll be closer to uh 74 volts or something for my truck so this should be like the the perfect part for this project because it'll work on on both vehicles the majority of this project really is designing the wiring and so i had to rig up the input and output for the charge controller it didn't have any spare anderson connectors on hand so i just lopped off the ones from the charge controller's input and used them to connect to the output which would feed the battery that was fine since i knew i'd be using mc4 solar connectors anyways on the input as i'd be plugging in solar panels there i had to create a wiring harness that put two sets of mc4 connectors in parallel since i had those 250 watt solar panels i was working with and i wanted them to work together to create essentially like a single 100 watt panel that basically meant creating a y to run those two sets of connectors together in parallel then i used the spare anderson connectors that i stole off the input side of the charge controller to wire in a 5.5 by 2.1 millimeter connector that would be my output and would feed my battery fortunately for this project the electric xp 2.0 e-bike can operate while the battery is charging and so this is all going to work fine but some e-bikes cannot turn on and operate while charging so if you want to try this on your e-bike make sure you try to turn on the bike while it's on the charger first to see if it's actually going to work and drive now the forward solar panel was in that nice rigid aluminum frame but the rear panel was flexible so i created a rigid backing for it from a sheet of particle board and then a bit of black spray paint later and you can barely tell it's there all right so up to this point i've gotten the solar panels attached i just lashed the front one down with some foam between the rack and the panel seems pretty rigid again this is all kind of experimental so it's really just a step before doing this on the truck on the back i did the particle board because this flexible panel extended pretty far past the rack i just didn't want it flopping around too much so i sort of rigidified it there and turned it into a rigid panel for the wiring harness i just finished this up and this is going to help me put these 250 watt panels in parallel so i'm going to have most of the harness up front here and basically if you follow along there's going to be this connected to one panel on here this is going to be connected to the rear panel and then this runs them into parallel and then we've got basically one 100 watt panel that i can plug into my charge controller so the charge controller i've got up here and as you guys saw i had to put the mc4 connectors onto the solar panel input here and then i went back and i just stole the anderson connectors because i didn't have any on hand and i used those to add the charge connector which is a 5.5 by 2.1 millimeter connector and then the nifty thing is i found that i can actually mount this on the mobile phone holder here so it's gonna be a nice little mount and give me a nice dashboard right up on the handlebars there so now it's kind of moment of truth let's roll this out into the sun and see if it fires up and charges the bike so wiring this in we've got our rear solar panel so we'll connect that in here and then we'll run this up to the front of the bike or we'll connect our front solar panel so now effectively we've got a 100 watt solar panel because we've got those in parallel the last step will be to wire them to the input of our charge controller and if we come around and look here so hard to read in the sun we're getting 20.5 volts in so that's perfect it means our panels are working and i'm not blocking them at all so that's good so the last step and this is really the moment of truth is to plug in our charging wire and see if that starts the bike charging man this thing is hard to read in the sun there we go all right so we've got 0.8 amps of output at 53.3 volts so it looks like we're charging at about 45 or so watts see what is that so we're charging at 43 watts so it's not the fastest charge we're also sort of partially blocking our panel here with the handlebars let me see if moving those out of the way a little bit gives us anything better oh yeah there we go now we're up to 1.12 amps so it's amazing how if you just block a little bit of one cell on a solar panel it really cuts a huge amount of the power the issue is there is that all of these cells are wired in series so even though you're only covering let's say like 10 of the panel if you're covering half of one of the cells you're effectively covering half of the entire series so you're really cutting your your power if you cover even a little bit of the panel all right so now we've got all the wiring nice and buttoned up let's take this thing for a test ride as a solar powered e-bike what do you say and it's it's amazing how much a cloud makes a difference so right now a cloud has gone over the sun and we've dropped from 1.1 amps to 0.1 amps so it's really cut almost like 90 percent of the solar power here we're down to around uh see about like seven or eight watts so it's just like killing our our power having this cloud right here but i imagine another second we're gonna get uh some more sun now obviously this is a bit silly like most people aren't going to ride around with solar panels this big on their bike kind of looks like i'm going around pizza boxes but it does effectively work i mean you could do this and people that do long range rides you know or like touring could actually do this and these panels aren't going to create like a huge wind load so you know it's it's a little bit reasonable now all right so the sun is really out now let's see what we're at uh we bumped up to 1.49 1.5 amps all right so we're doing closer to like 75 maybe almost 80 watts now out of 250 watt panels so that's pretty good doing like 80 percent of uh the factory rating on these so i mean it stands to reason that the power of the sun really makes a big difference when you get shade it kills the efficiency of these panels but in like bright florida sun here in the middle of the day in august we're getting awesome performance out of these so let's do a little more riding and then it's time to start thinking about how i'm gonna put this on the truck [Music] all right thanks for watching that video everyone i hope you found that interesting if you're planning to do your own solar powered project here i was able to take these two 50 watt renegy panels outfit them on the bike and get almost 80 watts of charging into this thing not quite as much as the um you know stock charger which is probably around 100 watts and certainly less than i'm using when i ride this bike you know the bike's probably pulling on average somewhere around 350 to 500 watts and closer to 750 when i'm really hammering on that throttle so obviously 80 watts of charging is not going to give this thing infinite range i'm using way more power from the motor than i'm actually generating from these panels but it's kind of a fun exercise to see what you can do and if i were to park this outside all day 80 watts you know in maybe seven eight hours i could get a full 500 watt hour charge on this battery so with the setup i have i could theoretically charge this bike every day from the sun not bad all right again thanks for watching everyone last but not least before i go it is time to announce the winner of the giveaway from my last video the randomly selected commenter is woodskins wood so congratulations just let me know which one of my books you'd like you can choose from diy lithium batteries diy solar power the ultimate do-it-yourself e-bike guide or my newest book the electric bike manifesto anybody else who wants a chance to win one of my books for free all you have to do is put a comment down below you can say anything you'd like and hopefully you'll be the randomly selected commenter at the end of my next video for anyone who doesn't want to wait that long to hopefully win one of my books you can always find them on amazon alright thanks for watching everybody i'll see you next time and hopefully next time we'll be putting one of these panels on my little truck all right see you guys [Music] you

Channel: EbikeSchool.com

Views: 77,902

Keywords: electric bicycle, e-bike, ebikeschool.com, ebike school

Id: bT9wXLHoI3A

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Super73UK]

We have seen many people ask questions about charging their Super73 bike from solar panels. Is this something that is worth doing or is it just a waste of time - If your interested then watch the video to find out...

(Yes we realise the bike in the video is not a Super73 but the principle is still the same)

(We are not an official UK dealer & have no affiliation in any way to "Super73" the bike company)