Solar charging station
By: This is a solar charging station i made with mostly spare parts.
The 100 watt solar panel is about $60 , that runs to a "Renogy" solar charge controller which was $30 , which runs down to a car battery i got on sale at Walmart for $50 into which i have plugged a 2500 watt power inverter that was $120.
Now a car battery IS NOT what you want to use for this setup , you want a deep cycle battery because a car battery can only be depleted half way before you have to charge it back up , or else it could be damaged.
A deep cycle battery allows you to drain it dry before you have to charge it , but CHA-CHING $$$
So now if the electricity goes out , i can charge my laptops , phones , GMRS and ham radios on the small power inverter on the top , but thats limited to 125 watts of power.
I can run my fridge on the 2500 watt inverter , but that would drain the battery in about 3 minutes.
I'll be building a much more robust version of this with 2 deep cycle batteries hooked up in parallel and 400 watts of solar panels to charge them.
You can buy pre-made solar charging stations but they cost $800 to do the same thing i did here for $300 and if any 1 part of them breaks , you have to throw the whole thing away ,,, with my setup if the charge controller goes out , you buy a new $30 charge controller, everything else is still working fine.