POTA Power — Jeff Stover Photography

This is a quick and sloppy page showing a couple of battery boxes that I use for POTA Ops.

These are just crappy pictures taken with an iPhone. The cases are cheap plastic ammo cans from Harbor Freight. The insides are not pretty, but these work fine.

The Bioenno charge controller is the best of the two shown below. It’s quiet when on the solar panel and works fine. The Renogy charger is has a ton of noise. You can hear the controller cycling when hooked up to a solar panel.

I have not noticed a difference between the Bioenno 20AH battery and the Eco-Worthy battery as far as operating time.

Each box has a 30-35 amp circuit breaker that feeds directly into a fuse box. There are fused USB and 12v cigarette lighter ports for charging. Anderson power poles are used on the outside of the boxes for easy connection to the radio, solar panels, external tuner or whatever.

The Eco-Worthy battery is much larger footprint than the Bioenno for the same 20 AH capacity. You can see the difference by comparing some of the pictures. The tray inside the Eco-Worthy ammo can was not used so I substituted a scrap piece of 1/4 inch plywood to mount the breaker and fuse box. Small angel brackets support the plywood. In the Bioenno box, I cut the handle off the inside tray and mounted the fuse box over the hole. It made passing wires to the fuse box easy.

One thing I have noticed when hooking up the solar panels to either box is the charge controller needs to be turned on PRIOR to the solar panels being connected. With the panels connected first and THEN turning on the controller, there is a power surge and will either trip the breaker, blow the fuse to the charge controller or both. I never have electronics connected prior to turning the main power first.

I keep meaning to rebuild these boxes to make them look pretty, but they work fine. Since I’m basically the only one that ever sees them I really don’t care.

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