SHTF - Cheap Emergency Solar Power! Use Any SINGLE Solar Panel! 1/2

foreign hey guys welcome back to another episode of will it fail what if you found yourself in a natural disaster like a earthquake or a flood or just a hurricane or something and you find yourself without power now if you had a grid tie system it could potentially be down as the grid would be down if you had a off-grid system it could be potentially hit by lightning and all your equipment be destroyed but if you could power critical devices such as your phone or handheld radio and 12 volt appliances with just a solar panel and a couple of cheap parts no inverter no battery no charge controller in this video we will see how we can power USB devices and 12v appliances using just one of these a DC to DC converter AKA Buck converter this particular converter has a wide ranging input voltage of 20 to 90 volts which makes it ideal for this type of situation you can use it with practically any solar panel you might find lying around let's get started okay so here's our buck converter it's got an input of 20 to 90 volts and an output of 12 volts at 16 amps so your kit will come with three modules a switch a 12 volt car adapter Outlet [Applause] and a USB outlet a face plate and three ring lock nuts now I already wired the switch so when you wire the switch if Up is on so Up is on make sure the first pin is going to be your negative so I have your long wire coming off like that and the two jumpers will go into your two modules USB and car adapter Outlet and then the middle pin for the switch will be the jumpers go into the positive USB and the positive on the car adapter Outlet the power source or positive from your battery or buck converter will be the last pin like this and that'll be back that will be your power in if you look closely on each module the switch and the two adapter Outlets you'll find a positive and a negative on this in this case the switch the negative is actually the gold pin but if you look at the USB module the positive is the gold pin so don't try to think that the gold pins are always going to be negative or positive because they'll be reversed like this one gold pin it doesn't even have a gold pin so just remember on the switch it's the negative one and just look for the negative and positive symbols on each module it is best to install the switch on the far right side or left side as the jumper wires will not reach after wiring the switch feed the wires through the ring nut and tighten the ring nut and now the switch is installed now we can install the car adapter Outlet module in the center hole and now it's installed there are many configurations of the USB module that you can purchase individually this one includes standard USB QC and the newer USBC or PD Power delivery ports the PD Port can deliver up to 65 watts of power for high power devices such as tablets and notebooks next we can take our negatives from the switch and jump it over to the minus and the minus of the USB and car adapter Outlet modules next we can take the positive jumper and finish the remaining connections now our USB car adapter module panel is complete okay now I have the car adapter module plugged into a battery and we'll see if it works there it is 12.8 volts finally we can wire the USB module to the buck converter using these nuts so we're going to take the output of the butt converter which is this Center black wire and the yellow output wire here so it's just going to be black to back in this case put our wire nut and then the yellow are positive output goes to the red positive on the USB module it's all done now it's ready to connect to the solar panel okay so these are the appliances we'll be using these are all made by a company called rode Pro with the exception of this little guy this is the rice cooker I got on Amazon so this is a saucepan and this will use about 12 amps this is a frying pan uses 13 amps and the coffee maker comes in at 15 amps all these appliances can be run on about 200 watts of power or less all these appliances will run off a standard car adapter 12 volt Outlet all right so for the USB side of things we're going to be testing these devices we have a handheld radio and charger I have a short wave radio some double a batteries USB rechargeable and a flashlight USB rechargeable we will be using a 250 watt solar panel with a VLC of about 38 volts let's quickly do a Power test it looks like we're getting about 175 Watts just to show you the power coming off a single 250 watt panel now this can be a bit scary check this out that's one panel 250 Watts well it's about 180 watts and at 30 38 volts so be careful when you're doing this here I am using mc4 pigtail connectors the female connector will connect to the positive or red input wire on the converter the labels I have on the pigtail are in relation to the buck converter normally these will be reversed but in this case we are connecting directly to a load if you choose to use wire nuts be sure to strip the wire back about one half inch to allow for good contact if the connection is not good it can heat up it would be better to use xt60 connectors or even butt connectors I am taking the minimalist approach here with just a single panel never use wire nuts in a solar system as they are not really intended for DC current okay there we go now we got our mc4 conductors now we'll put our inline fuse on plug in our positive side and we'll plug in our negative side now we should have power to the buck converter you can turn on our USB and we should see this power meter light up check it out Isn't that cool so we have a solar panel powering this USB panel directly no battery no inverter no charge controller straight off the solar panel so let's plug in our two radios turn it on so you can see our radio came on and this is our handheld radio it's pretty cool so we're using uh a half an amp 0.42 amps I love Snap-on plug in some more batteries so now we're charging the batteries and the flashlight see everything blinking now let's plug in my phone to the other USB port over here look at that our voltage has dropped to 11.8 we're pulling one amp I'll just clamp it right there 1.8 amps before we test the cookware I will swap out the USB module for another car adapter Outlet module I had laying around a nice feature of this system is that you can purchase individual modules to customize your panel how you like okay so we're going to first do the skillet and we're in the rice cooker because we cannot run this one at the same times too much power so these two together should be fine it's going to be pushing it to the Limit though and then we'll do the coffee later I tell my wife about this video and she really wanted to help out so here she is so we're going to trim this on and see how much power we're gonna get this spot converter has a max of 16 amps output so we're already at 11 amps and these things are still warming up so let's see how far we get start that we're pulling just over 14 amps and these wires back here these things are almost hot to the touch and rice everything's at its limit this bug converter is at its limit the solar panels and its limit these wires are at their limit well yeah the socket may be good for 250 Watts but the wires going to it definitely not all right I think we're about 30 minutes in and we are oh man we are really pushing the wire here look at this it's on 14.96 amps oh there we go 15 not good not good I'm trying to keep the keep the air on these wires so they don't burn up now let's check the rice see how that looks almost cool it's almost done look at that just a little bit of water left in there the rice cooker just finished and we just have our pan left let's see what it looks like I lost audio at this point so I'll just comment it's been about 45 minutes and the rice is well cooked the sausage and egg are well done as well and it all smells so great breakfast is served the coffee should take about 15 to 20 minutes however it looks like some clouds are on the way so we might not have consistent power all right so it's taking a little bit longer than expected because the clouds keep on coming in and out in and out we're dropping our power up and down but uh Coffee started though see it sort of fogging up there they're starting to percolate watch what happens when the clouds come through you see the vote you see the amps drop and then the buck converters start squealing like a little pig up right now M1 8th and we just lost our power down to eight amps it still works it's just it takes longer see if we can get the amps coming back up oh there he does came right back up maybe we lost it again come on let's go get back up there all right back in action I think clouds are making this really difficult but I think we got enough coffee that's it we got our breakfast took two hours coffee eggs fried egg and rice and sausage first try some solar powered sausage so if I had no power and this is all I had to cook my food I'll eat this every day the coffee is nice and warm everything else is cold now although that buck converter is great for using on any panel lying around if you wanted to purchase a specific panel that's not too big yet small enough to carry around you might look at one of these this is a renergie the 100 watt panel it puts out 20.4 volts on the low side so that buck converter will accept 20 volts minimum so it barely cuts the wire on the low side and this panel is only 89 bucks and it's a 22 efficiency I believe it weighs about 30 pounds so you could potentially tote this around you could put it in your car you can definitely mount it on top of like a toy hauler if you drive a big rig great use case put it on top of your cab run the wires down to your buck converter and use your 12 volt appliances 100 watt you would need two of these to really utilize the buck converter let's hook it up and see what we can get out of it this panel is brand new and is producing just over 90 percent of its rated power see what we get 12 volts so with 90 Watts off the solar panel we should be able to power any USB device probably have a hard time powering car adapter appliances all right so we've got uh some batteries hooked up I got the phone and a flashlight let's see how much power almost two amps let's try something bigger it runs but it's struggling let me unplug all the USB stuff foreign so yeah I could probably do quite a lot which is 100 watt panel I'm going to take the output of the butt converter and try to charge this battery now since this bug converter only puts out 12 volts we won't be able to charge this battery very far because the voltage curve of a lipo 4 battery it's going to reach 12 volts very quickly once the battery reaches 12 volts it comes up to the same voltage as the butt converter we will no longer to put we will no longer be able to put any more power into the battery but for a lead acid battery you could probably get the battery charged quite a ways that's why having an output of 14.5 volts would be ideal let's see if we can charge this battery I have this battery completely discharged so this voltage should be less than 12 volts So currently we're reading 11.3 volts 11.29 volts I have the buck Corner connected to this alligator clip and the other end is I have a ring a ring terminal on the other end so we're going to pull up the BMS and we'll see if we can get any current flow going into this battery and you're probably thinking yeah why not just use the charge controller yeah well the point of this is to be minimalistic as possible and see how many things we can actually do with this type of setup connect I don't know what it's going to happen I've never done this we're doing this live doing it live all right so we're going to connect this up and see what happens sure that's good check it out 11 12 amps we are charging the battery with 12 amps look at that is really cool yeah 11.2 11.5 on the clamp meter and 10.8 on the uh on the BMS so I'm curious how many amp hours we could actually get into this battery I don't have a shunt so I can't really track it but we can take the number it says remain capacity 0.0 or 0.0 amp hours on the BMS so if we can just watch that and we'll see how many amp hours we can get in to the battery hopefully the shunt the internal shunt on the BMS is is accurate in emergency situation sure you could do this but there's no protection that the battery was full it would keep on trying to charge it would be up to the BMS to then stop the incoming voltage so no safety on these so now I swapped the 250 watt panel for a 335 watt panel to see if the panel is not the problem because it's about 4 P.M but there's no change the output is like that is the same so at this point it wouldn't matter if I even put a 800 watt solar panel on the input because it's not going to put out any bolts any more bolts because the battery voltage is too high dang it we're still at zero percent I can't even get it to register one percent on the battery battery voltage is now almost equal to the buck converter output voltage that's funny I was going to shut the battery off and I looked at the display and I got one percent so you can see that BMS has zero percent remain capacity 0.0 but the display is registering one percent so all right just to prove that it's not the solar output for the output of this that's restricting our voltage flow we're going to Short Circuit the buck converter really quick and watch this this has a max of 16 amps so if the solar panel is putting out enough power we should see at least 16 amps [Music] don't do this at home wow I registered 20. yeah so I looked high and low to find a Plug and Play version with a high input voltage range of 20 to 90 with a decent output of like 14 to 15 volts but I could not find one for the life of me but there are variable units out there they're not very beginner friendly because you have to basically tune your output voltage and input voltage and depending on the input voltage it will determine your output voltage but they do exist there will be a link to one in the description below so I went back and I looked to check the price on this particular unit the 16 amp unit and it's no longer on there they only have the 10 amp and after the 10 amp you have to go to 20 or 25 amps so I must have got the last one so but I included links to the description below for the 20 and 25 amp units as well as everything else you might need to build this system so a couple things to note about the USB car adapter Outlet panel the wires they give you are pretty thin and I looked about at 10 of these things and they all have the same thin wires those wires are rated for the USB module itself not necessarily the car adapter Outlet the car adapter Outlet module it's just a dumb device right it can handle 200 250 watts of output but the wires going to it and the fuse that they sometimes put in line are only rated for like 10 amps so if you get one with a few just cut the fuse off and I would definitely upgrade recommend upgrading the wires to like a 12 or 14 gauge wire but you can run up to about 15 amps with those 18 gauge wires but they'll get quite warm but it will work yeah so it's pretty amazing what you can do with this simple setup I think the most practical use is a fan or cooking but since there's no battery you have to do it during the day and I think in the future I'll do a video where I'll make a small box with a tiny battery in there and so you can actually store the power and use that power during the night time maybe the perfect little camping power supply in the near future I'll include links to the parts used to build the system as well as a schematic and how it's wired on my website so yeah that's it thanks for watching [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Nate's DIY Solar

Views: 248,902

Keywords: off-grid, off-grid solar, offgrid, diy solar, solar power, shtf, emergency solar, cheap solar

Id: IFSVIkmaAtA

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023