One Red Hot Solar Lamp

So the other day I was in the office of our environmental engineer we call her the "Green Lady" and she had the coolest little green desk lamp. when I say green I mean it was the color green and environmentally green too. It was solar powered, in the base of the lamp is a solar panel with a battery box attached to it that has 4 AA rechargeable batteries. I assume it has some type of charge controller but it might not. I asked her where she got it and she said IKEA for 20 bucks. I just had to get one and try it out but you know me MR. DYI I though of some ways to make one and even found some parts to start making one. Well before I could get the design going the "Green Lady" bought me this red one for my Birthday.

It's pretty cool I'm using it right now to light my keyboard. The solar panel/battery box comes out of the base so you can set in a sunny window to charge. The box is beveled so it sits at an angle to the sun to help it receive more sun it's a real good design.

It takes awhile to charge but it does provide a few hours of light as you can seen in the picture it puts out a lot of light. I'll post up dates after I have it awhile, so far it's a winner with me.

Under the sun so little time (Update!)

Well I thought that my solar creation at first was working well, but it was not charging the phone battery as fast as I was discharging my solar charger. So I tried just charging the VZ 6800 phone every few weeks. This way it would have two weeks between discharges to recharge the battery in the solar charger. It work, but it only made my VZ 6800 energy independent for 6 days out of the month.




Now as for my other phone the samsung, I could charge it and that worked well, but it doesn't get used every day so it would hold a charge for about two weeks anyway. I did stumble across some good news though, when I was testing the output of the battery and the solar panel I disconnected it for two weeks and forgot to hook it back up.

What I had found out was on a vary Sunny day the panel will power the VZ 6800 with no battery attached at all in full sun. I think that in the winter months I will have to go two weeks or get more panels. In the summer or on bright days in February it will charge it with out a battery or with it. So the end result is it works it just works allot better with more sun wow imagine that?

So many projects under the sun so little time (Update!)

Well I have a small step towards energy independents! I took the VW solar panel and retrofitted the ODBII plug with a set of Anderson power pole plugs so I could charge a 7.2 Amp hour 12 volt sealed lead acid Battery. I then took an old Pampers diaper wipe box and put the battery in side and mounted a cigarette lighter socket in the side of the box. After that I cut a chunk of wood to screw the cigarette liter socket to stiffen it up, then I screwed two four bladed terminals blocks to the other end of the chunk of wood.



With that done I connect the battery and the cigarette lighter socket to the terminals and made up another set of Anderson power pole plugs to connect to the terminal and ran them out off the side of the box to plug in the solar panel into for charging the battery.



The best part of this set up is I can use the Anderson power pole plugs to charge the battery from the solar panel or plug battery from the box into a radio or any thing else with Anderson power pole plugs on it.




Well I conclusion have made a small step towards energy independents because i can charge my cellphones from the sun and all the other small gadgets like my ipod and other stuff. In the design I have only a few concerns, one I think I need to vent the box because of heat. Also I'm not sure if the terminal blocks will heat up on the wood block under heavy load could be a problem. The last one is the charging circuit was for a car battery not a small sealed lead acid Battery. It does work I can charge my phone so I guess I will test and let you know what happens in a later update.

So many project under the sun so little time to get them all done

So I was on eBay the other day and was looking for solar panels and came across these VW solar panels. There pretty cool they were going for around $22 - $50. I was wondering where they came from because as far as i knew VW wasn't in the solar business. Well there not, the panels were made by IPC solar for VW to keep there car batteries from going dead well there cars were being shipped from Germany. So the question is how were the people on eBay getting them? Why because there cool and I wanted one to play with for my ham radio emergency power project. So I found some guy's blog like mine and found out if you ask the VW dealer they might just give you one. I asked they said no that they ship them back to VW. Not true! A friend of mine with a vary nice Audi who has allot of work done on his car asked one of the mechanic's at the dealer for me and he produce 2 of them one me and one for my friend.