Living the American Green

Assuming that our solar panel continues to work under long exposure to actual sunlight, assuming our wiring doesn’t fall apart when someone breaths funny, and assuming that we can attach the damn thing to a battery long enough to matter, we now should have the ability to charge a 12 volt, at least somewhat, during the non-rainy days.  (whew.  I am exhausted from all those qualifiers.)

But how to spend our ill begotten gains?  The tricky part is getting the power being taken back out of the 12 volt battery into a format that your friendly neighborhood three pronged plug in can recognize.

What you are looking at here is our Tempest™ Battery and our plug’n'play power inverter (that you can get from most reasonable rest-stops or Radio Shacks® you might stumble into.  Mine cost, I think, $14.99, though I quoted it in the last post at $13.99. On the other hand, I have had it for more then five years…).

The adapter is attached to two wires that we wrapped in electrical tape, but that are on the two contact points that a car cigarette lighter attaches to.  In theory, you can get other kinds of converters that probably work better and plug in cleaner to the battery, but since we knew that the Cigarette Lighter on a car runs straight from the car battery, this made sense.  Plus, it was on hand.

Seriously, that little adapter has been the best investment I’ve ever made.  Many a road trip has now been laptop assisted for much longer, and many a cell phone has been charged without having to have three hundred different car plugs.  Get one today!!  Or wait till you are at a rest stop and they are much cheaper!

Because we didn’t know how much power the battery had in it at the time, we decided to drain the thing bone dry to get a baseline reading of what it could accomplish.  To do that, we wanted something with a high steady draw that also invoked the spirit of the project.   Hmmm… Alternative Energy… Dirty Hippies…

Solar Panel being converted into Lava Lamp!   You can see here, if you look close, the tentative conenction we have on our adapter.  The wires are literally just sitting on the +/- of the battery, so this thing can’t really be tossed around.  Also of note: this is the same crate that we used to convert to Solar Panel holder… so the entire thing is a highly fragile but self contained unit!

I also don’t have much of a sense of how efficient this power inverter is.  I mean to say: I don’t really understand what 12 volts does to sass its way up to 115 volts, but building our own power inverter might be a project for another day.  At this point, found items around the house was the way to go.  The takeaway: if you don’t have this sort of inverter laying around, you can use pretty much anything that plugs into a car-cigarette lighter for easy to convert, easy to wire solutions of how to get your power back out of the battery.  I don’t yet have a great take on how regular a battery output is, so I don’t yet have advice on things that can and can’t be powered by our lil’ gray buddy.

Now we just need a day or two when it isn’t raining like mad to test how much Lava Lamp we can get out of a day of sunlight!

Part 1 of the SPP (Solar Panel Project): Research Phase.

Part 2 of the SPP (Solar Panel Project): Solar Cell Phase.

Who wrote this one?  TheAmericanGreen - The founding member of the American Green institute, and a New York based producer and writer hoping to make the jump from "freelancer" to "documentary producer". Read more from this author