Solar powered

My knife sharpening booth is almost entirely solar powered.

A solar panel charges a battery, and that runs my equipment and all my accessories: phone, credit card device, handheld grinder — even heats my lunch and water for afternoon tea.

The solar panel is folding, 100 watt devoce, it has a charge controller attached, this is hooked up to a battery, and an inverter is hooked up to the battery.

The charge controller monitors the battery voltage, and delivers electricity to the battery as needed. Once the battery is fully charged the current is turned off. The battery is a 56 amp hour AGM sealed lead acid battery. The inverter is a 1,000 watt pure sine wave device, its job is to change the battery’s 12 volt DC current to standard household 120 volt AC current. This is what most of my equipment uses.

I say almost entirely solar powered as sometimes — during extended cloudy days — I will top off the charge on the battery at home, this happens a couple of times during the winter rains.

I also carry (for redundancy and convenience) a self contained lithium power bank. I often use this to power the system when it’s raining or dark, and let the bigger system charge up via solar, and this is the unit that I would charge on household current.