Using A car battery to power up your Laptop
In Today’s world, many countries around the globe are suffering from power outages, with more people relying on electricity for working in general, and especially during the pandemic, people need to power on their laptops, so, whether you are a student or an employee, I have the most efficient way to charge your laptop.
Disclaimer: Even though I tried, tested, and implemented every single step taken in this article, I am not responsible in any way for any damage that might occur to your electronic devices, do this at your own risk.
Let’s start with the Why?
if you live in a place where power outages are common, you might have experienced different solutions, so let’s start by discussing some of those right away.
- Using power generators.
- DC to AC inverters.
1 — Using Power Generators
Power generators will use petrol or diesel to power up the generator that generates AC current (220V/120V depending on where you live), then you can plug in your laptop charger as you would normally do when there’s electricity.
Now, this obviously has many drawbacks, aside from the carbon emission from these generators, and the crazy noise that comes with it. It costs a lot of money.
2. DC to AC inverters.
These devices will use 12V/48V DC batteries, (i.e car batteries) as an input, and then convert that to 220V/120V AC.
The main drawback here is efficiency,
Your laptop accepts only DC current (not AC!), so in this case, you are converting your 12V DC to 220V AC only to be converted back to 19V DC (depending on your laptop). Do you see the problem here?
Let’s elaborate further, most “cheap” inverters in the market produce a square wave which can be harmful to electronic devices, moreover, there’s ~20% power loss (if your load needs 100 watts. This type of inverters would waste 20 watts and the overall consumed power from the battery would be 120 watts).
Normally, you get a sine wave from the power grid. There are inverters in the market which produce sine wave where power loss is reduced to only 6%, however, they are really expensive.
Enter Step-up converters!
These devices take DC input and provides DC output, and since laptops only accepts DC currents, this is our perfect solution
Components needed for Charging a laptop via 12v battery:
1 — Step-up converter 12V to 20V (10A only)
2 — Voltmeter display.
3 — Battery cables (from the battery to the step-up converter).
4 —Laptop charging cable (cables from step up to the laptop)
Here is a general overview of the project
Let’s start with the step-up converter (Our Main Component)
This is our main component here, wiring the step-up is easy, just connect your battery to the input terminals, adjust your output voltage to meet your laptop’s adapter output voltage (changing the screw position in the blue resistor until you achieve the desired voltage), and then connect the laptop charging cable to the output of the step-up.
tip: use a voltmeter display or an Avo meter to get the desired voltage value.
Wiring:
A picture is worth a thousand words.
We used a converter from QSKJ (since it was available in the market). Your DC-DC boost converter may differ, check the inputs and outputs.
The only note here is to carefully check the polarity. Again. DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING!
Testing:
Final Results:
Here are some of the devices that we assembled
Side Note:
My Friend Beshr Eldebuch is using solar power to power up the DC-DC Converter to charge his laptop whenever he wants during the day, this also works! stay tuned for an upcoming article from him explaining how he set up this system.
Conclusion:
As you can see, this method is simple and cost-effective yet it solves one of the most prominent problems that many areas around the world still face to this day. Increasing the overall productivity for employees and students.
Special thanks to my dear Friend Beshr Eldebuch for helping me writing this article.
