Sustainable Framework Charging

General Topics
1

I thought it would be cool if I only charge my framework from renewable energy, so I got 2, 200w solar panels and I hooked them up to a Victron solar charge controller.

This connects to a 100ah 12v chins battery. They are down to $240 on Amazon now I believe.

Then I connect a Victron 12v inverter to this and I can charge my framework anytime.

If anyone else is interested in this, a bonus tip is using a smaller portable battery, take this to your main solar hub and charge it once or twice a week, and then use that to charge your laptop around your house.

Feel free to ask me anything. I also have a raspberry pi reporting to victron’s remote management system so I can see how my solar is performing from anywhere.

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2

Why go up to AC and back to DC? There are 12V to USB-PD adapters (usually in car power socket form factor) that could be easily modified to power the Framework without losing ~10% going DC-AC-DC…

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I could use a car 12v adapter but I’ve found that it’s kind of messy with the amount of wires I have.

Victron’s inverters are crazy efficient. I run an AC load of 11w all night long and the inverter loss is only 4-5w, 15-16w is pulled from the battery.

Since it’s this good, I just run everything from there.

Many direct DC things I’ve tried over time either get too hot, or can’t come close to the 100w+ PD specs

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74% isn’t what I would call carzy efficient, it’s not horrible also not great and then there is a second power supply killing another 15-20% to go back from ac to dc.

Fair there is a lot of cheap crap out there but there are also solid ones that can do 85-90% end to end and 100w pd.

The car ones that go into the lighter port tend to not be intended for extended 100w even if they can do it for a bit, at least most of the ones I tried. The 65w ones were largely fine though (and 65w is plenty for my laptop use).

One major plus of your setup is that you can use other random ac devices with it which may be worth all this inefficiency and bulk.

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The overhead on that inverter is only around 10w even when I’m running 300w loads.

And yeah for sure, I had a couple break already lol. if anyone finds a 12v supporting over 100w that would be awesome, they do all seem limited to 60ish watts.

So I just make the panel size a little bigger and never think about using standard AC adapters and ignore the efficiency losses

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96% efficiency on an inverter sounds a little hard to believe, especially from 12v

Over 100w is going to be hard for now (very little PD2.1 hardware out right now) but 100w is pretty available and 65w is probably the most common (since that is as high as you can go with unmarked cables).

That certainly is one way to go about it XD

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I found the data sheet for it, i believe its 90-92% so i must be misremembering or it was closer to 200w when I saw that level of loss

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If your inverter is outputting square wave or modified sine wave plugging in a computer power supply might cause damage if the power supply’s power factor correlation is trying to draw a sine wave