Hi Odyssey camper here Today I want to talk to you a little bit about this nano solar kit that I made using small 50 watt solar panel and a battery jump pack The goal of the project is to show how you can build something That's similar to a yeti goal zero 400 for about a third the price That's including the solar panel, but before I do that. I wanted to thank everyone that subscribed on YouTube I really appreciate it. I've got like 7000 views which blows my mind and Originally when I set this up I just did it for some friends to show them how they could get out and see the country without spending a lot of money without investing in an RV and I've got a real favorable response. I've also got People reposting on Facebook on their Facebook groups. I really appreciate that And if you like the videos I'd appreciate it if you'd do that By all means share them I mean I want people learn how to do this and Save themselves a lot of money and have fun in the in the process and so the more people that can see it the better so moving on with things I originally shot this as a DIY do-it-yourself video and then I realized When I watched the video and did the editing that it was so dang boring Watching someone assemble electronic parts is pretty dull so what I want to do instead is film this little intro here and To show you the components and and most of you are gonna go oh, okay I see how it goes together.
I can do that That's no problem, and that'll be enough for you if you want to go into the DIY That's at the end of the video, and I'll show you how I soldered everything together and what connectors I used The parts list is down at the bottom. So if you look in the comment section or above the comment section you'll see that There are links to everything on Amazon, but things like this jump pack you can buy elsewhere And then in the middle I compared a couple of different jump packs, so I like the Sears diehard 1150 unit but this schumacher unit does almost everything that it does for a lot less.
We're talking I paid $70 less on retail for this than you would for a die-hard There's a couple caveats so if you watch past this intro you'll see the comparison and then it gets into the DIY Section so what am I holding, I'm holding the Schumacher. Jump pack this has a built in 18 amp hour battery it Also has an inverter has a USB charger and has an air compressor it can jumpstart a car So it does like everything you'd need on the road except charge itself You're going to be parked for a while To get a good idea to have a solar panel setup So on the back of this 50 watt solar panel you can see where I've wired in a charge controller This is a 7 amp actually Schumacher brand solar charge controller, which is ample for recharging these battery packs The nice thing about the Nano solar is it recharges quickly because you don't have a lot of reserve capacity however I'll show you later on the video. How you can increase the reserve capacity of these by just adding a battery And you'll still be able to use this 50 watt solar panel to recharge so in about an hour I was able to bring the die-hard battery pack from 81% up to 100% and I'll show you that later in the video This panel works quite well It comes in an aluminum frame again, there are links to Amazon you can acquire all this stuff on Amazon you might want to check the Sears site directly when it comes time to buy the Battery pack if you decide on the diehard unit so later in this video I'm going to show you a comparison between the different battery packs also Show you this solar unit recharging the battery pack And then I'll get into the DIY section for people who want to do that again Thank you very much for your subscriptions.
Thank you for your shares on social media on Facebook Especially I noticed people post things to the Facebook groups And I really appreciate that helps to get the word out on how you can get out on the road for a lot less You know if you wait your whole life to plan for buying that giant RV that giant RV just keeps growing in size with the features that you want and Eventually you realize that geez I'm gonna be retired by the time I can get out in the road And then I'm not going to be able to go do the trails and things like that so Hopefully these videos show people how they can get out By themselves or whether you know a couple of people and enjoy life alright.
Thanks again for watching so while I was putting together the solar panel for this project I decided to see if there was a If there was another battery pack out there That would do something similar for less and I came across this Schumacher unit I'll put a link down in the notes So you can find this I got this off of Amazon and what's interesting is This was a hundred and fifty dollars new I got it at a pawn shop for I think 60 so I got a pretty good deal there, but I went and looked at the Schumacher unit and it was priced in 109. There was a special Amazon coupon, and I actually got it for 80 bucks delivered to my door I thought that was a pretty good deal, and once I started looking at I noticed a lot of similarities, but some major differences So four similarities you have a work light at the top here, so just like The power pack you get three white LEDs similar brightness so that's the same you have a digital readout for the Battery level just like you have a digital readout over here for the battery level What you don't have over here is an output for the air compressor the air compressor Actually, it has an old-school dial on the back You see that So you can't set it to a certain pressure and then Just let it go on its own like you can with a diehard unit that may or may not be important to you One thing you do gain with the schumacher's unit is this little port up here Which is designed to inflate an air bed comes a little hose so that's a low pressure high volume for filling an air mattress, and then you also have the air compressor just like on the diehard unit I Pulled the battery and i'll show you that in a minute It has the same batteries the diehard unit so the same amount of reserve power There are two 110 outlets or two 12 volt outlets the diehard has two USB Chargers where the schumacher only has one they both have the same jumpstart capability and the same power for the jump start Here's one major difference in my opinion The the most important one the Schumacher instant power only has a 200 watt inverter So they're saying 300 watt peak 200 watt inverter in the documentation Where the die hard is a full 400 so whether or not you have anything that big that might make a difference I don't think that would dissuade me from buying the Schumacher Because I could just plug in another you know small unit like this excuse me I Could just plug in a unit like this small sine wave full sine wave inverter or something cheaper you can get a 400 watt inverter for probably 20 bucks now so that may not be a deal-breaker for you the nice thing is These are readily available on Amazon that unit's a little harder to find that Amazon But you can always find at the Sears if you still have a Sears nearby Kmart might carry em I haven't checked Kmart carries a lot of the Sears brand items Both of them can be charged with our solar panel so just like the diehard unit I can plug right into here with my solar panel and Charge directly.
There's one last thing. I'll say about these battery packs When you first get it, it's covered with these stickers that say charge for 36 hours Charge immediately after purchase for 36 hours, and then somewhere else it says Charge every 30 days At charge after every use and every 30 days So if you go online you read the reviews of these people say oh it worked great for a couple months And then I went to use it. It was dead. Well you have to charge it every 30 days That's not really a problem if you've got a solar panel Or if you've got two plugged in to a charger or someplace in your car, in your vehicle but there's kind of a concern when You throw it in the garage or throw in the trunk and don't use it for months So just be aware of that treat it right when you first get it for a long battery life And then in charge it every 30 days Similar weight guessing each to be about 25 pounds although.
I didn't look it up, but just that's what it feels like to me The plastic is similar I don't think anyone's more likely to crack than the other the Schumacher has an extra panel on the bottom kind of skids on the bottom of it that protect the the plastic But I don't think it's inherently any stronger than the other one so there's two options for alternatives to the goal zero 400 The the main thing you lose when you go to something like this other than saving hundreds of dollars When you go to the diehard or the schumacher battery pack.
You only have 18 amp hours of battery power and I believe the goal 0 400 is 33 amp hours Ah if I remember right so there's a simple solution to that if you decide you don't have enough reserve power in these You can buy a replacement battery And those batteries are 22 amp hours But you're not going to replace the battery in here what you're gonna do is Plug it into one of the 12-volt connections there and add an auxilary battery so this can be mounted in your vehicle someplace And then you can plug into your your Schumacher charger But one thing to watch for when you do something like that if you're planning on expanding your battery You should probably do it up front so buy the battery in the beginning The batteries are going to last longer if they're charged and discharged the same way so if you do plan on increasing the capacity It's a good idea to buy that battery at the same time And I'll put links to all this down in the notes as I've said before you can get a lot of this stuff on Amazon Check the prices check the local prices atyour auto parts store might have something like the Schumacher the die-hard at Sears Often times Amazon's not the best deal.
It was a smoking deal for this when I bought it I went back a few days later, and it was higher than the original price. I think it was 120 dollars I took apart the Schumacher jump pack just to see what kind of batteries are inside And it's exactly the same kind of batteries in the Sears diehard unit it's an 18 amp hour Same size battery that can be replaced with the 22 amp hour so no advantage there as far as the battery goes they're both internally same amount of power I Tried to do this project as simply as possible Not using any soldered connections or not But connecting to the solar panel you still need to do a little bit of soldering to do it right so If you don't have the equipment to solder or you're not practiced at it Your best bet is probably to go to a place that repairs Cell phones it replaces the screens and batteries and what not they'll often have someone there that can solder and they can do this First step for you, but once that step is done.
You can do the rest of it yourself, so okay to get started prior to soldering on to these Connections here what we're gonna want to do is make sure the panel is faced down or you have cardboard over the panel you don't Want the panel to be generating energy while you're in there sticking your fingers around? It's not enough to in my opinion to harm you but you don't want to short anything out so make sure the panel isn't producing any electricity and Now we can go in and do some soldering so the first thing. I'm going to do is tin the connections on my plug connector So I've got this plug connector that we're gonna run in here This end is ground. You can see the black wire going in there So it doesn't matter that we're exposing that right now the positive is insulated bright outside connected to anything so Just stick it in a little Place to hold it here, and I want to tin the wires and that's going to make it easier to make our mechanical connection later on so a little bit of Solder on the iron there to get the heat flowing Heat up the wire a little bit of solder in there great I had to grab my wife vocals for this next part So I'm gonna bend over the tip of Each of these wires.
I don't know how well this will show up in the video But essentially there's a little hole here in the connector, and I want to use that to make a good mechanical connection before I solder I'm going to just stick these wires into the hole Bending over the end All right now that I've got these two wires in place And I've bent over the bottom of the wire just gonna close the crimp blog on here I guess it's a not really a crimp plug but Just squeeze the connector here Okay, so now I've got a good mechanical connection, and that would actually probably hold I've got it on there so well But that's not the way you want to do this you want to solder it for the best current flow but also To make sure that that never comes loose So got my soldering iron again Make sure we're tinned up for heat transfer Actually, I'm going to turn that up a bit for this step So when you solder quick soldering lesson I'm trying to do is transfer the heat to the material so you put a little glob of solder on there And you touch it onto the material But what you're actually doing is trying to heat up that metal and you're going to feed the solder in at a different spot once that metal gets hot enough So we get that going I got a big lug there so it's going to take a lot of heat do it and then we're gonna just flow the solder into the connection not necessarily where the wire is touching and Repeat over here, which you might actually be able to see a little bit better Little glob the solder just to get the heat going And then we're gonna flow the soldering up the joint down here And when you're done you should have a shiny connection there so at this point I'll go back And I'll clean up a little bit of the get the flux off of there and the flux is the acid core rosin core That's a mossad ER and that's what helps the the solder to stick to the metal right now We've got a very good McCann connection still.
I don't want if someone pulls on these cables. I don't want it to Stress these connections, so what I'm going to do is put a little strain relief on these by zip tying the wire in place That's just feed a zip tie under each one of these cable tie depending on what part of the country you're from Now there's a couple of ways you could do a strain relief here You could not the end of the wire and then solder in place Or you could use a zip tie the main thing is you want to make sure that? If anyone pulls on that cable, it's not going to pull against this connection and damage anything Just crank down a little get them a little tighter clip the end off You know actually have to clip it that close because you want this to be a strain relief So you might as well just leave a little bit extra on there All right at that point we can tighten down the The nuts there's a little rubber gasket in here and as you tighten it down It compresses it and squeezes onto the wire to make that a weather tight seal Depending on the type of connector you buy if you buy the ones from Amazon or whatnot you may have to add a little piece of heat shrink tubing to make this wire big enough for that to properly clamp down on and form a weather tight seal I Don't plan on getting the panel wet but it's nice to know that if it does it's covered, and we'll just close this access door Now you probably can't see this in the video, but these are labeled negative and positive to make sure you have the right sides All right, so at this point.
I'd say you go ahead and connect to our solar charge controller But depending on the source you read online people actually advise you to not connect this to the solar panel until you've connected it to the battery and it has to do with the processor in some of these a Lot of them are powered by the battery and so you want to give it a second to boot up or whatever I don't know to run the internal program and then connect it to the solar I don't think it matters with these, but we're gonna go with the protocol if you have a digital Control, they have something like this.
That's microprocessor controlled. It's probably more important than on these little Schumacher's I think these are our non Microprocessor, but either way we're gonna Do it the right way and we're going to unpackage this then connect to our battery pack and then connect to our solar panel? And pull this out a Note about the wiring on these when you look at these connectors the bare connector is not always ground sometimes it's positive so you have to be careful when you connect these our solar panel is going to connect in here and when we do that we want to make sure that red goes to red and Black goes to black and I took this apart to ensure that this is the case, but if you look at the wire color here Blacks on this side and that follows all the way down and same with the red so on this middle part This part is actually positive and this part is negative And when I look at this one this part is negative and this part is positive And then when I look over here, this is positive, and this is negative.
We're not going to use this This is the load side, and if you want to connect a small load to a solar panel while it's charging You can use this connector. I'm not going to bother with that We're just going to use these two and so the one that says solar is going to connect here and when I do connect it Let's see it's polarity protected The red wire is going to go to this side and the black wire is going to go to this side and so it'll have the proper polarization Next step we're going to connect to the battery first so we need to plug our 12 volt adapter in here and I'll notice on this thing it actually has Red on this side so it's positive on this side, so I'm gonna have to make a connection change there So I had to make a little adjustment to my plans once I took a close look at this connector I realized the polarity polarity was wrong so what I've done is I've cut the cable and reversed the polarity and Then I'm going to slide a couple pieces of heat shrink tubing over that so no one will get confused about the color coding Slide that up there And then we'll put a larger piece over over it when we're done So I'll go ahead and heat shrink those so now that we've got the polarity corrected on a 12 volt plug I can go ahead and plug this into the battery pack Note that.
I'm using a diehard battery pack. That's the 1150 portable power, but actually I'm gonna go back and Shoot another video with the Schumacher battery pack because I think it's a slightly better It's also $60 cheaper than the die hard unit so Watch that in the upcoming video But this method will work with either battery pack So if I take a look at this and it just checked the battery level it says I'm at about 81 percent battery Left and again alright so when we're done here. We'll see what we're at Well go ahead and plug this into the 12-volt connector and close the inverter one That's in there good and secure We see the LED light light up on the plug meaning that there's voltage there And I'm going to plug into the charge controller So again, this is going to go to the battery part of it flip that over Connect the charge controller That's interesting. I don't see any lights on that yet, which probably means that It's not powering off the battery pack. It's going to power off the solar.
That would be my guess So again it probably doesn't matter, which one you do first, but so everybody says to do All right, so now. We're going to plug in Red red black black on the solar side Sometimes this connectors are a little harder to put together there we go All right, so we should be able to bring the solar panel out in the Sun. See what it'll do So I'm outside northern latitude, I'm up in Michigan in November, so we're getting a little bit of Sun Probably not as much as we'll get in the summer But the yellow lights on so we can definitely see that we're charging on the charge controller Later on we'll attach that to the back of the panel I just wanted to keep it out in the open so it was easy to see So let's give it an hour and see how much charge we get after an hour on the 50 watt solar panel Back from 81% to full charge. I went ahead and turned on the inverter on here Just so I could put a little bit of load on the battery and make sure I was again the false reading But keep in mind that these meters and the power packs are not Completely accurate so you know if you do the math out and you go out.
That's no way it could be a hundred percent It's got to be ninety eight point to The Demeter's aren't that accurate but close enough to prove that our solar panel is charging And we can't get it back to 100% Now keep in mind that that was Afternoon Sun so it's November. I'm in Michigan right now, so it's a higher latitude and it's Late afternoon so I ran this for an hour on the charger between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. So really other than clouds it was a nice clear blue sky It wasn't the ideal circumstance but good enough to prove a point that you don't have to buy a Yeti Gold zero to get almost all the benefits and plus a couple extras or the do-it-yourself kit, that's under $200 The last step of this project is a little optional what I'm gonna do is connect the Charger module to the solar panel, and I'm going to use 3m trim adhesive This is automotive trim adhesive.
If you've never used this stuff before it's it's awesome Basically, it's used to hold on automotive trim. It'll survive desert heat freezing climate You just want to make sure when you apply it that over 70 degrees or so for it to stick So I put a few strips on the back of the charge controller Just peel the backing off of that And then stick it in place And that is going nowhere So there's a little bit of space under there for a little bit of ventilation although the charge controller doesn't really need it It'll stay on even if the panel gets hot in the Sun We've got our wires here It's actually low profile enough that if you were to put a backing panel on this you can close the entire thing and it wouldn't It wouldn't be in the way you could also set this panel against the you know something flat I'll probably put a stand on it and end up using it to charge my battery pack and Also have it up in the wind shield hopefully at RTR Charging my larger battery pack that I'm making right now But if you just want the capability to be able to charge the battery pack similar to a Yeti cold zero Goal, zero, this is this is what you want Well I hope you found this video useful and learn something and if not hoping to inspired some ideas so you can go out and build your own system Again, this is a nice way to do something similar to the Yeti.
Gold Zero 400 With the exception of the battery capacity without having to spend $600 for the the Yeti and the solar panel here We spent less than $200 and we got almost all the capability plus We have a self rescue capability in the jump pack where we can jump our vehicle we can Jumpstart somebody else's vehicle, and we've got an inverter built in a few other options but we've also have an air compressor, so As far as I know the Yeti Goal Zero 400 does not have an air compressor And it does not have jumpstart capability so you give up a little bit in battery power unless you had the auxilary battery But your gain the other tools so all-in-all. I think these are a better way to go thanks for watching and Give you a little preview of my next video Pick up the tripod here working out a little project with my console and the Honda Odyssey phase 2 project Yeah, I can point that up there there we go Let you think about what might be going in there
