[Music] with all the hype around solar power and electric cars lately you've likely at some point had the thought why don't we just put solar panels on a car and charge them indefinitely well last year I explored this idea and made this car that charges using only the three solar panels on it and while this added a bit of range it was far from infinite so in this video I'm exploring this concept a little further and making some modific ations to my solar powered car to finally hunt down that infinite range [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause]
so last September I did an entire video on building this solar powered electric go-kart [Music] thing it actually turned out really cool and on a good sunny day it has a range of around 100 km and on just the batteries alone that ranges closer to 60 or 70 and while that's cool right from the start of this project my whole idea was to explore the possibility of something producing more energy than it uses and essentially having an infinite range theoretically on a perfect sunny summer day it has 3,000 watts of power 4,000 W hourss of
battery capacity and generates about 450 WS of solar power when driving in the clear Sun so to dramatically upgrade my range I'm going to have to add quite a few more solar panels to generate enough energy to sustain what it uses so first I just took it out on the road and just did a little test with it just to get an idea of how many watts it's burning on average and from this test it looks like it's burning anywhere from about 200 to 800 watts per motor assuming it's not climbing a steep hill so
I think I could realistically give this a burn rate of say 600 WTS per motor or 1200 watts if I can get a solar grid to produce more than 1200 watts I should be able to sustain this indefinitely well it's sunny [Music] so rather than modify the structure of the car I'm going to be building a trailer that the car will tow that'll host a solar grid so for the main frame of this trailer I'm using some 1X 2 in steel tubing with a thickness of 0065 in and first I'm just measuring out my four
main pieces and then cutting them each with a 45° angle [Music] [Applause] and once I had a piece cut I'd use a sanding disc in my angle grinder and just clean up that edge to get them ready for welding so basically I'm just making up the main rectangle of the frame right now and it's 14 ft long and 42 in wide and this should give me enough room for six 175 W solar panels and to W these pieces together I'm using this cheap flux core welder that I've had for a decade and fusing this tube
in together around all four [Music] sides and I'm definitely not the world's greatest welder but I can weld somewhat structurally so I'll just clean this up with an angle grinder that's what they're for anyway [Music] and now that is a perfect weld so next I added in one crossmember with some extra steel I had around and now I'm going to add on the tongue using this 2in x 2 in steel tubing with that same 065 thickness once I had that welded in place I'm using some more of the one by two uh brace the tongue
onto a couple other points on the frame [Music] [Music] [Music] sh with the main portion of the frame rig together it's now time to add some Wheels now the cheapest and definitely most wasteful way for me to get these wheels is just order another bike like I built the original car out of that gets me two 20-in fat tire wheels identical to the ones that are on the car for about 300 bucks and if I wanted to buy an individual wheel it costs about 300 per wheel so how does that make any sense anyway I'll
just throw out the rest I guess so with these wheels I roughly measured out about how wide of a drop out I would need and then I did some quick maths before I cut up some more [Music] steel so what I've basically done here is is weld together a rectangle with a pocket at each end to hose my wheels and then I'll weld on some of the steel plating that's going to accept the axles of the bike [Music] wheels so first to make these plates I'm using some 1/4 in thick plate steel this piece is
3 in wide and I'm just cutting some 3 and 1/2 in Long sections of this using my chopsaw then I'm marking out a axle sized hole for the bike wheel and drilling that through with a pilot bit and then my 3/8 in final hole [Music] size with all four of my pieces cut and drilled I'm using a cut off wheel in my angle grinder to cut out the width of this hole so that the bike axle can drop out the bottom [Music] so now back to assembly with my first plate I just measure out the
center and then weld this square right [Music] here and then I'd Mark out the center on the opposite side and use a clamp to hold this snug while I put the wheel in place and measure from the edge of the frame to the edge of the rim to see if my wheel is running Square to the frame I'd make some little adjustments with the clamp until I had the same measurement at the front and back of the wheel which meant my rim is more or less Square to my frame and these plates can be fully
welded on this really isn't a Precision build it's more of a proof of concept and prototype so this doesn't have to be absolutely 100% perfect but I am trying to do the best I can with the tools I have available which really isn't many for this type of job I must say my welding is getting better though that looks like it might not fall apart so with my axle framing completed I can take this over to my main frame and weld this [Music] on and then take this completed trailer frame outside for some sanding and
paint I used a bunch of sanding discs in my angle grinder to get rid of this rust on the steel because it's been sitting in my shop since last year and it's done a bit of oxidizing oxidization rusting then I'm just using some regular trim clad rust paint and painting this aluminum silver [Music] [Music] [Music] now I can bolt on my bike wheels and move this trailer frame inside and start working on the solar [Music] [Music] components for my solar panels I'm going to be using those same flexible solar panels that I used in the
first video and the reason for that is weight these flexible panels only weigh about 7 lb and a rigid manufactur panel weighs about 60 lbs and I'm not really sure why so in order to save a bunch weight I'm going to keep using these flexible panels and make up some more wooden frames to be the rigid portion of the panel assembly for that I'm just using some of these cedar fence boards and ripping them down to width and then cutting some 45° angles go to make a rectangle that's about a/2 in wider and longer than
the panel [Music] itself so now the wood portion of this panel will weigh about 4 lb along with the 7 lb of the panel giving the assembly a weight of 11 lb versus 60 of the pre-manufactured aluminum frame panels and for a vehicle every single pound you can save makes it more energy efficient and this is literally going to save me hundreds of pounds to match the car I took these wood frames outside and gave them a code of some vibrant red spray [Music] paint and now we're ready to start assembling my solar trailer [Music]
so I'm going to be bolting each one of these frames directly onto the trailer so to do that I first clamp the frame into it final position and then I drilled through the frame and the steel with a bolt size drill bit then I took one of these gripping nut things and Hammer that into place into the wood and then I can bolt this in from the bottom side and that way when the solar panel gets glued down on top of this this assembly can still be removed from the frame just by simply undoing that
bolt at the [Music] bottom now I can start fastening the flexible panels to these wooden frames to create the rigid panel unit so first I just laid out a liberal bead of some cocking I had just laying around the shop and then I stuck the solar panel on top of this and used some stainless steel wash washer and screws as a second method to fasten this to the [Music] frame now I'm going to install a hitch and for that I'm just using a normal trailer ball hitch this coupler slides perfectly over my 2-in channel and
I can bolt that into place [Music] and now I have to install a ball on the back of my car so I have some of that left over/ Quin steel plating that I'm going to rig up to hang a few inches off the end of the car with a ball on it [Music] now instead of welding this on where I'd have to remove all the electronics and the floorboards I'm going to bolt this into place so that I don't really have to remove anything [Music] now that I have that dry fit and I know it's
going to work out I can remove that and take it outside for some paint and then do the final installation [Music] [Music] so now I need to wire these new panels into my car battery I have nine panels all of the same spec and three of them are already connected in series on the car so I'm going to do that same series Connection in groups of three with the remaining six panels on the trailer so that I'll have three groups of three panels each that'll then Connect into the charge controller in parallel so to do
a series connection I can just take the positive and negative wire of two panels and connect them together but in order to get rid of some excess wire I'm just going to cut these off and install some new mc4 connections it's the exact same thing just shorter [Music] wires so now I have my two series connections between the panels and my remaining positive and negative lead ready to go out to the charge controller now I can do the same on the remaining three panels at the back so a quick explanation of what's going on each
of these panels is 18 volts 175 wats and 9 amps so when I connect a series group of three panels it's basically giv me one big panel with an operating voltage of 54 volts 525 WTS and 9 amps then when I bring these three panel assemblies into the charge controller in parallel the charge controller is receiving 54 volts 1575 W and 27 amp [Music] maximum now I can start running the remaining wires along the frame of the trailer up to the charge controller so to connect my three panel assemblies into the charge controller I'm just
going to use one of these Branch connectors that basically connects three positive or three negative wires into one wire that goes directly into the charge controller to make it easy to attach and detach all the wires will hook into these with some mc4 [Music] connections so it's easy as this to hook up my trailer one more thing on all the positive leads I just put some of these inline 20 amp fuses just to protect each run front of individual panels and that's the wiring complete this should now charge the batteries with a maximum input of
1575 W so now I want to do just a couple quick touch-ups to my car design before I take this out on the road first of all right now I'm just using the normal cable brakes that came on the bicycles that are pretty squeaky and don't have much stopping power so I'm going to upgrade these to some hydraulic brake lines [Music] and now my brakes have quite a bit more stopping power and makes me a little more comfortable in this rickety machine I also added on a rear view mirror [Music] and a battery voltage monitor
so I can get a rough idea of how much capacity I have left and now it's time to see how far this thing will drive you are all [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so I started this trip at shortly after 10 with 117 km on the odometer thinking that if I can put on 300 km in 1 day that's got to be considered infinite range for a thing that goes 35 km in an hour and has a 60 km unassisted range on these very same roads I had a perfect Clear Blue Sky day for filming this
and by noon we were producing about 1350 WS of consistent solar power I've filmed almost all of this just clicking off laps around some side roads near my house and by 2:00 the battery was still almost complet completely full however I have only gone just over 80 km because of all the stopping and starting involved with [Music] filming so I called in a stunt double so that I could still get these shots but we could keep the car on the road driving with almost no unnecessary stopping [Music] oh by 4:00 we were up to 130
km with still a nearly full battery at 53 1/2 volts and an hour later we had added on another 30 km but thanks to some clouds rolling in and the lowering Sun we're just now starting to monumentally eat into the battery capacity showing 52 1/2 volts which is more like 75% or so since our solar input dropped from about 1,000 wats an hour ago to about 350 watts in the clouds right now for the first time during the day we're no longer producing an equal or even a greater amount of energy than we're using luckily
by about 6:00 the sun did come back out and we were able to generate about 5 or 600 watts again but that's going to be shortlived because that Sun is setting [Music] fast by 8:00 we are all the way up to 240 km but our solar input was down to just 55 wats and our battery was getting critically low at 48 [Music] Vol and sure enough about 10 km later just as we were running out of sunlight as if this was written in a poem our solar powered vehicle rolled to a stop [Music] [Music] I
just want to show you quick what happens when this runs out of energy it'll go for a little bit and then run out of power then as the solar panels collect more energy you'll get little bursts of throttle [Music] as the battery regenerates and obviously that' happen a lot quicker if there is more sun so the total range of this was 250 km but had I used the perfect time of day better around 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. when I was doing a lot of filming I'm 100% certain we could have got this to 300
km and I'm like 50% certain you could do like 400 km on this if you perfectly used your time which is absolutely insane for a thing that has a range of 60 or 70 km that just the batteries and definitely theoretically infinite [Music] range obviously this has no real world practical purpose at least not yet but that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of value in what was learned here and that knowledge can be applied to Future projects and I hope some people watching this video can use this as inspiration to try something that nobody
thinks will work as always thanks for watching my video and if you can hit the like button as that greatly helps the algorithm boost these videos and fun future projects I'd also love to know what you think of this rig in the comments below or any ideas to make it better and until next time thanks for watching
