Yes, you CAN charge your Tesla with portable solar!!!

this video was a month in the making and yes i am successfully charging my model 3 from what is commonly called a solar generator it's really solar panels hooked up to a dc power station but you get the idea sun goes in power goes here you have outlets and you can plug things into those outlets to power them solar generator now i talk about all the shade that you see right now it's one of the challenges of living in the woods there will be more sun later on in this test for me to cover but i couldn't wait until later to try this out once i had all of the pieces to do so and right there we're already down to 38 percent and we're putting about 500 watts in at a time i'm expecting to get around three miles of range but i don't want to wake it up to even see where we are right now i'm going to let this run to the end but before we get to that i want to show you all the things that i had to do to get this working i've seen a couple other channels try this unsuccessfully and that's because none of them reduce the charging current manually down to a reasonable amount one that is below the amp rating of the power station they're using we're going to start with 5 amps the jackery is going to be capable of delivering more than that but i don't know if i want to even try it because this isn't about getting power into the battery quickly it's just about seeing if we could transfer it at all from a solar power generator a solar charged power station into the tesla battery so in order to get this to all work these are the components that we need a few are actually built into the solar panels themselves the jackery has what's known as a floating neutral and in order to get it to work with the tesla mobile connector you have to use something like this this is a portable generator bonding plug and this is actually something that you can make yourself but i was able to buy this off of amazon and that way i don't have to worry about whether i got it right or not and i have somebody to go after if it doesn't work and then i have this because the different plugs on the jackery aren't bonded together so i need to plug this in here and then this will go in here and then we're going to plug the mobile connector in here this is very heavy gauge on purpose i wanted to use something heavy gauge so that i don't have line loss issues voltage issues between the jackery and the mobile connector you can see there's a ton of shadows right here and it is 10 10 48 you can see why i don't have solar on my house we've got trees everywhere and i'm actually not expecting these solar panels to provide any juice it doesn't matter because at maximum i could get about 175 watts out of the two of them combined but we are going to be getting about i would say 800 watt hours out of that jackery into the tesla battery and about an hour's worth of time that's not going to add much to it in that amount of time even if we were in direct sunlight it's really about using solar panels to charge the power station which then can charge the tesla not necessarily all at the same time now this is gonna be the first test let's see if we can get this to turn into a green light yay green flashing green we're good there okay next step so far so good that worked and now it's flashing blue flashing green oh my gosh it's working it's working the amps are up to 5 amps now and it shows 110 volts which is correct that is the actual voltage coming out of the jackery it shows zero miles an hour of charging but that's gotta come up this is so cool it's actually working now this is gonna take about two hours for this battery to go to zero and expend its thousand watt hours not all of it's going to go into the tesla battery because there's going to be line loss there's going to be loss of of power that's actually used to power the mobile connector the battery management system actually is back here the battery management system and the tesla uses power so you're not going to add a thousand watt hours to the tesla battery but we're adding something again with the shadows you can see why i don't have solar in my house this is november 17th it's 11 02 a.m and those solar panels are barely getting anything i'm getting six seven watts of power from them when their maximum combined capacity is around 175 watts realistically when powering the jackery because again you've got some line loss going from 100 watts 100 watts connected into the jackery you can max out at about 175 watts but wow this took a lot of research and planning and i am just giddy that this is working i'm not sure where i'm going to put this in the video but you can see right here some driving stats this is from the last time i charged i drove 138 miles it took me 38 kilowatt hours to do that which works out to 277 watt hours per mile so out of the maximum 1000 watt hours that the jackery can provide i could get a 3.61 mile boost to range but i'm not going to get all 1000 watt hours into the battery into range because the mobile connector takes power the battery management system inside my tesla takes power there's going to be power this loss to heat so it's probably going to be about 80 percent of that or closer to about three miles that i could add if i go from 100 charge in the jackery all the way to zero but it'll be interesting to see what actually happens of course by the time i edit this i will know but as i'm making this part of the video right here i don't know how it's gonna turn out it turned out pretty well since the outlets in the jackery power station are all regulated the roughly 500 watt output stayed the same from the start all the way to the point the station turned off i didn't bother chasing the sun to add power with the solar panels but i would absolutely do that if i had to place a park and have sunlight through the entire charge it took an hour and 38 minutes to add the three miles of range i was expecting though i could have theoretically bumped up to as much as nine amps and charged even faster i wanted to be conservative for this test and stuck with five amps this was absolutely a fully successful proof of concept i used that power station which can be charged with those two solar panels and about eight hours of normal sunlight during a day and i got about three miles of range added that's all i was expecting and that's exactly what we got charging stop 225 miles plus three miles and it's still getting actually two volts from the power station that's pretty interesting oh my gosh oh like i said that was a month in the making and it all came together on a windy fall day with leaves falling everywhere and about an hour or so i'm going to have a little better sunlight right there to be able to see what i can get into that power station but there we go oh that's fantastic this solar generator is from jackery which is a company started by a former apple battery engineer to make portable renewable power sources this is their top of the line system consisting of a 1 000 watt power station and two 100 watt folding solar panels the explorer 1000 power station is a 1002 watt hour lithium nmc battery capable of 1000 watts sustained power with the ability to peak up to 2000 watts to start things like power tools or small ac compressors it has a maximum power point tracking controller for solar charging which combines with the extremely efficient monocrystalline saga 100 solar panels to turn a remarkable amount of sunlight into battery power there are larger systems available but this is as portable and durable as you're going to get for something with its output that's why it's the system i wanted to use for this test even though it's not designed to charge evs it's as capable of doing so as any system with enough power to add range in an emergency and enough efficiency to capture that power from the sun while i'm waiting for that sun to get in a prettier position for video i am going to put some charge back into this power station it comes with a dc plug to be able to plug it into your 12 volt socket in your vehicle and charge it also comes with this power brick or 120 volt oh i have that in there and you'll see i actually have these outlet protectors on so i don't kick dirt into them we'll we'll get this up to about 10 15 percent maybe a little bit more before the sun gets in a good position to be able to go back to charging and see what we can do with the sunlight hitting the panels correctly you can already see like even my own body is going to be an issue with the sun on these panels right here but i already have this topped off to 10 percent off of the 120 volt in my garage but now i'm gonna do some solar power here and there is no real shade on those panels i'm still getting only about 120 watts they're not angled directly into the sun yet i actually angled them ahead of the sunlight so i don't have to keep coming out here oh i got leaves on there i gotta pull those off even even leaves like on the bottom over there that can be an issue you can't have anything on the panels where it really cuts into their efficiency so i'm going to clear those and i am going to see what kind of charge we get over the next half hour or so and then we'll come back and we'll run the test again charging the tesla i let this run for just over 20 minutes and the panels provided a very consistent 118 watts or so of power for the entire time even though they were in direct sunlight their kickstands only provide limited ability to adjust their tilt and that could have cut into their efficiency regardless it shows that you need about eight and a half hours of this to charge the battery from empty which is right at jackery's claims that means in a summer day of sunlight starting with a fully charged power station you could actually add maybe 8 miles of total range to a model 3 like mine that's enough to be useful though i wouldn't suggest buying a solar generator just for that there are many more practical uses for them to have one on hand it's just nice to know you might actually be able to rescue a model 3 if it was within 8 miles or so of a more steady source of power so i know that's not a fluke but let's get this all going again so i have a splitter so that i can run the bonding plug in a place where the tesla mobile connector can sense the ground i'm going to plug that in and then i'm still getting about 119 118 watts of solar turn on the ac and that powers this this is green and this is actually taking about 9 watts just the mobile connector we're at 16 now with the battery and i know how this is going to go push the button up wake the car up here why is that not working there we go and that is that has nothing to do with this solar setup we got green and it is charging so we're back to 537 watts that's awesome i gotta walk all weird to keep from casting a shadow on the panels that is awesome it actually works i am so psyched that this works this is not practical in any way but i was i was actually frustrated by watching other people trying this and not getting it to work because they knew what they were doing wrong so so i'm i'm glad that i was right and what i was thinking and this is all working this is fantastic the battery in my tesla model 3 is about 75 kilowatt hours big that's 75 times the battery in this in fact you need to recharge this about 90 to 100 times to use it to top this off from empty because of line losses and things like that and you need all the solar charging capacity to ramp up along with it these are mono crystalline solar panels and they're among the most efficient that you could get at 23 efficiency in the united states the average driver drives about 29.2 miles per day which is about 7.5 kilowatt hours of battery using the average output i got from two of these panels you can see i need about 16 of them to generate the 30 miles of range that i might be using day after day if i drove like the average american and that's for my tesla model 3 which is the most efficient electric vehicle on the market by far when you start talking about cyber trucks and other large vehicles you quickly see that it's just going to be impractical for them to be hauling around enough solar generation to be able to power themselves day after day after day it's not just enough to have the panels you need to keep them aimed at the sun throughout the day otherwise you need even more solar panels to make up for it that means you're going to be spending the large part of your day aiming solar panels or you're going to need to have some kind of contraption that automatically does that which will need to be powered by the solar panels actually if you have it on a tesla and the tesla had enough room i guess the tesla could move itself throughout the day but again that is going to take power that you're going to need to generate from even more solar panels charging any ev with solar power is doable i just showed that you could but it's not necessarily practical adding miles of range in an emergency actually seems like it might be a pretty cool use of this kind of system though you don't even need the solar panels to do that you just need to have one of these all charged up and ready to go the solar generation in this setup is meant for powering your campsite your van life your off-grid power tools and i'm working on a video showing just that when i get it done i'll be sure to pin it in the comments as well as put it in the video description buying a system like this to charge your ev on purpose i just don't see that as currently rational however it is really cool that it works if you're interested in getting jackery products for yourself using the links in the video description and pinned in the comments to do so will help the channel if you want to get a tesla for yourself be sure to use my tesla owner's referral code it's right here it'll get you free supercharging if you do be sure to subscribe so you can see more videos on solar generation i really appreciate you watching the tech of tech and hope to see you next time bye

Channel: The Tech of Tech

Views: 254,315

Keywords: solar generator, solar power, jackery, jackery explorer 1000, jackery saga 100, power station, tesla, tesla solar, ev, electric vehicle, tesla charging

Id: 69QpA5H1bYI

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020