He came back! The Electric Mini Truck has another fun trick up its sleeve. With a bit of DIY magic, I managed to fit my Chinese truck with a solar panel that can be charged by the sun.
If you're not familiar with this cute little mini truck, here's the background: I found it on Alibaba in 2021 and paid the Chinese seller to bring it to me.
It went through a long history to ship to the US, costing a little more than the truckload. But he eventually made it to Florida, where he lived a difficult but rewarding life on my parents' farm. There, it mainly serves as a work truck on the property, although it occasionally goes outside to entertain the neighbors. Everyone loves these quirky little things.
An electric car means it's quiet, largely maintenance-free and doesn't require trips to the gas station to refuel.
The latter is important because it's not even street legal, so it lives out its life on the job site as a work truck.
A relatively large (for a small truck) 6,000 Wh battery typically gets about a week or two of use before needing to be recharged from a standard 120V wall outlet.
It was fine, although waiting all day to charge was annoying.
So I decided to take advantage of the abundant sun that bakes the cod on the roof every day while sitting outside. For this, I got a small solar panel to mount on the roof.
If I could charge it while it was in the sun, I wouldn't need to plug in a large LiFePO4 battery to charge it nearly as often.
You can follow the process of installing the solar panels on the truck in a video I made of the project, or read on for details.
The largest panel that did not extend beyond the existing roof was the Renogy 50W solar panel. Not huge, but good for charging on the go Assuming about 35W of solar power (they don't call Florida a sunny state!) for 8 hours a day, I figured I'd be able to drain 300Wh of charge a day. .
While the truck only drives a few miles a day on the 10-acre farm, that's probably half of its daily use. This won't completely remove it from the grid, but it will roughly double the time between charges. And the panel will be small enough that it won't affect anything else on the truck or extend beyond the confines of the existing roof.
I was able to mount the solar panel using PVC pipe for brackets on the roof rack. After being painted black, they basically look like existing steel pipes and the installation looks like a factory job.
The tubes allowed me to tilt the panel slightly, meaning I could park the truck on the north side when not in use and get a nice south angle for high solar efficiency.
To match the roughly 18VDC from the solar panel to the required charging voltage of my 60V battery in the mini truck, I used a solar charge controller. It is the same one used in a previous solar electric bike project and is much more powerful than I need. But the extra power means that if I ever want to build a car or other large solar panel, I can plug it directly into the truck and get a big charge while I'm parked by the sunny beach.
The actual process of connecting everything is pretty simple. The solar panels plug into the charge controller, which plugs into the battery charging port. I was able to access the charging port using a spare plug under the mini truck's charging cover (I'm still not sure why the mini truck came with two different charging ports connected to the same circuit, but I'm glad). The hardest part was removing the trim inside the truck to hide the wires leading to the solar panels.
Once installed, testing showed that I could get between 30-35W of power under most conditions. At one point I hit 45W when the sun was at its highest point in the sky, although the average is a more realistic figure of 35W.
Since installing the solar panels, I have noticed that the charging time has almost doubled.
My family used to load the truck every 10 days, now we can load the truck every three weeks.
A panel big enough to fully load the truck would be nice, but I didn't want it to be so big that it obstructed the bed since we use the truck almost daily to move stuff around the property.
The bed has a hydraulic jack that raises it about 45 degrees, about the size of a dump truck, so I can't extend the panel very far back.
I would say the project has been a great success and proves that solar charging on vehicles can be effective if the vehicle has low power (my truck is around 5hp).
Conventional solar electric cars can't really be compared, as a day's sunlight isn't enough to charge a good portion of their massive batteries. But if you have a small electric vehicle like a small truck or an electric bike, especially one that doesn't have to go very far every day and is usually in this area, you can really make an impact, even if it's just enough. small panels.sun.
For anyone who has been wanting to try a DIY solar charging project like this, I would definitely recommend giving it a try. It's surprisingly simple and easy. It's hard to describe the exhilarating feeling of seeing your device "magically" charged without plugging in and then coming back to admire your handiwork. Or at least, without going into the wall.
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