One of the last challenges we need to sort out is how to feed all of our power-hungry gadgets while on the road. It’s fairly easy to keep phones charged up, but when you throw in cameras, drone batteries, a laptop, GPS, and a pile of other goodies it becomes a little more complicated. We really are camping, but seem to have the power requirements of a small nation-state.
When we attended the Southeast Overland Expo last month, we saw a variety of solutions folks have come up with to solve this problem. One common solution is to use a small generator, but they are expensive, heavy, and take up a lot of space. They also tend to be noisy and are not allowed in many camping areas. There’s nothing quite like enjoying mother nature with the soothing sounds of a Honda buzzing away in the background. We definitely don’t want to be “that guy.”
Another popular option is solar power. Solar allows you to power and charge your gear while on the move, assuming the sun is shining. Considering that we’ll be visiting the “Land of the Midnight Sun,” solar is actually a pretty good option, but not really the best fit for our application. It is pretty expensive, and most of our prime solar real estate is already taken up with our rooftop tent and other gear.
In the end, we settled on a pretty low-tech, lower cost, hybrid solution: a 20,000 mAh rechargeable power bank to fuel the smaller devices, and a 500W power inverter to charge the more power-hungry items (including the power bank) using the Jeep’s alternator. Both for about $120 total, delivered next-day by our local Amazon driver, Barry.
The Bestek Pure Sine 500W inverter connects directly to the battery and converts the 12-volt DC into 120 volt AC, just like you have in your wall plugs at home. Pretty much anything you could plug into an outlet, you can run off this inverter. We mounted it to the roll bar, just behind the driver so it can be easily accessed by the passenger. The inverter will allow us to charge up while we are driving down the road.
The Anker 20,000 mAh battery pack can be charged up using the inverter and used during the evening to charge up our phones and other smaller devices. We have tested it out and found that it can provide at least 8 phone charges before needing to be recharged. Hopefully, these two solutions will keep everything topped off and ready to go.
For a much more detailed, and slightly satirical look, at how all of these things work, please keep reading “Below the Line.” Disclaimer. I am a Mechanical Engineer, not an Electrical Engineer. For a brief period early in my college career, I considered EE. That train left the tracks as soon as I took my first EE course. All that to say, my descriptions, although probably not 100% accurate, are probably solidly good enough. Mostly.
Below the Line
From Primordial Ooze to Margaritas – How To Power All That Stuff in Your Car
To get started we have to go back. Way back. Like, back before dinosaurs back. Back when countless numbers of microscopic plants and critters lived their lives in the ocean, then died and sank into an ever-growing layer of slimy ooze. Eventually, this ooze was covered up with rocks and sand and squished under high temperature and pressure to transform into what we today call crude oil.
This crude oil has bubbled up out of the ground here and there throughout recorded history, but the petroleum industry as we know it really started in 1859 when David Beaty discovered that if you drill a hole down in the ground in the right spot you can pump these liquified former sea critters up to the surface, where they can be reliably converted into cash.
Once liberated from the ground, the crude oil is transported by pipeline, ship, truck or train to a refinery. At the refinery, our prehistoric friends are converted into a variety of useful products. The one we are interested in is gasoline. The gas is moved by pipeline, ship or barge to distribution terminals where it is then pumped into tanker trucks to transport to your local gas station where it is unceremoniously pumped back into a hole in the ground. (Actually, a tank in the ground, because we care about the environment and the oil companies don’t want to see their profits escaping back into the ground.)
This is where you and I come in! It turns out those ancient zooplankton and algae stored up a lot of energy back in the day, and that energy can be liberated in a series of small, contained explosions to scoot your car down the road. You can top off the tank and motor on your way. [For those of you reading this a few decades in the future, you will undoubtedly say, “But wait, fossil fuels were outlawed decades ago!” Well, at the time of this writing that’s still a way off, and most folks are still motoring around in their vehicles powered by decomposed and distilled ancient sea critters.]
The internal combustion engine not only allows you to wheel along your merry way but also drives many other systems. If you look under the hood of your fossil-powered vehicle you will likely see a rubber belt that runs around several shiny, spinny things. One of these is called an alternator, and its job is to provide the electricity needed to run the car and any accessories.
Inside the alternator are magnets and coils of wire that convert the spinny motion into alternating current. Alternating current is what you have in your home and is good for moving electricity over long distances, but it can’t be stored very easily. So, the alternator also includes a gizmo called a rectifier that turns the alternating current (AC) into direct current (DC) which can be conveniently stored in the car’s battery for future use.
Most of your small electronic devices, like a cell phone or tablet, run off of DC power. That battery is typically charged to around 12 volts, but your devices typically only require about 5 volts, so they require a transformer to step down the voltage to the right level. If you have a little plug you stick into your cigarette lighter to plug your power cord into, that is one of these transformers.
But what if you want to use something that requires more power? Maybe something like a blender, so you can enjoy a nice frozen margarita while roughing it? Well, that blender runs on 120-volt alternating current, so we’ll need another magic box called an inverter. The inverter takes the 12 volts from the battery and steps it up to 120 volts of blender-fueling alternating current. And there you have it – you can now use that processed primordial ooze to make some killer margs.
We don’t actually intend to take a blender on our road trip. But perhaps our next trip to the beach…
Thanks for reading!
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