DIY Portable Mini Power Station in under 10 mins for under $600 | 1.2 KWh

this right here is a portable DIY power station and this is the one I highly recommend that somebody or anybody watching this video build for relatively cheap and less than 10 minutes rather than buying a pre-made one by insert name brand here any any name brand uh you want to find mainly because there's so many of them on the market you can't even keep track right there's obviously a few big name branded ones there's also lesser known ones that just seems like everybody's trying to build one or sell you one but I would say just build this cuz it's almost infinitely better on many cases right you can build it for cheaper you can swap components out you can customize it to exactly whatever your needs are and you don't have to worry about the company going like bankrupt or not existing or not honoring warranties or any of that stuff anymore because you have it built for you and you can switch out the components it's easy to build right so if you want to know more about this stick with us all right so let's get into it right obviously this is very easy to build you got a battery you got some plywood you got an inverter you got a breaker you technically you may or may not even need that breaker in your case but all you really got to do is get a battery take some construction adhesive uh adhesive the plywood to the bottom of the battery get this inverter and then screw the inverter to the plywood bam done that's probably like less than 10 minutes actually right that's all you really need to do right you may want to take some time to clean up the wires and all that kind of fun stuff right but other than that less than 10 minutes you can get it going uh you know obviously construction hesive is going to take a time to dry it so 24 hours 48 hours whatever it may be but you know you're not going to be sitting there twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the construction adhesive to dry so let's just say 10 minutes or less right you can get it going so uh let's go over some of that more in detail so obviously this is a B RV uh battery this is 100 amp hour battery which makes this battery 1. 2 KW hours um which you know this is group size 24 and if you're going to make this I would recommend getting this size main because the inverter is this size so if you got a smaller size let's just say a 60 amp hour battery then inverter is going to be sticking out a lot already so at that point you're using the space just get a bigger battery right so there's that um but you know obviously if you're trying to reduce weight just go with the 60 amp hour battery or even the 30 amp hour batteries right there's batteries of this uh capacity or or of this uh 12vt uh class in all different kinds of sizes I just use this one but whatever right so uh this battery I we do have a full review of of this battery and this inverter independently on the channel so if want know more about that go check that out I will go ahead and say this battery does have Bluetooth even though it's unadvertised it has bluet too so it's easy to Monitor and and see all the specs and stuff like that right so uh before you go off and say oh this is not very here because you're holding it together by Glue it's construction adhesive it's been tested many times on many people's YouTube channels that this construction adhesive can hold hundreds if not thousands of pounds depending on how much we've applied so you know it's fully cured don't worry about it uh this is a B RV 12v 2000 watt pure sine wave inverter okay they do make a 3,000 watt I believe and even like a smaller wattage one so if you want to make a 60 amp hour battery and a smaller one you could do that you know that's probably even more portable and I would recommend you do something like that right the other thing I would recommend putting on here is uh so when I set this down I always set it down on a piece of like foam to avoid SC scuffing this up but you know you could always attach that foam here I just didn't do that mainly because I don't know I just never got around doing it so anyways there is that let's get into a little bit more right so like I mentioned this has a full review of this item on on the channel but this inverter is interesting mainly because this is a 12volt pure sideway inverter and it has a control panel from the control panel you can turn the inverter on and off see you know how much it's drawing the voltage it's putting out all that kind of stuff right and it's got two AC outputs one 20 amp Port here and it also has a USB port here so with one inverter you can do all of that you don't have to get another 12vt uh USB adapter to get USB cuz this has it right here and that's one reason I would prefer using this rather than you know another Standalone system to get that going right so uh wiring very simple you got two wires coming up from the battery the positive goes into this nater DC rated circuit breaker which breaks the circuit between the battery and the inverter and that goes to the inverter so if you're going to build this um I would recommend the circuit breaker you technically I guess don't need to have it but if you don't have it then it's kind of hard to completely kill power to the inverter right because the wire is going to be sending it there even though the inverter is off so if you're also going to build this one thing I would probably recommend is you could put the wires straight up here and kind of make an offset that kind of comes up here and goes like this that way you reduce this wire clutter or better wire management to make it look better that's something you can do I just didn't do that many because I just didn't get around to doing it because it added the breaker because I wanted the breaker right so uh there is that so um we don't need to go over too much of the capabilities of this because like I said it's pretty straightforward but I can hit the breaker the inverter here will come on it will beep it's got the light it's got you know the frequency the voltage the amount of capacity it's coming from the battery you could even turn the AC on and off you can turn the inverter on and off all from this right so in order to kill the beeping I'm just going to kill the inverter so let's kill that pretty simple so this actually someone's going to say well it's not really a power station because you don't have ability to charge it and you would be right so this is actually the third version I think I built of this thing the first version I built did have charge capabilities and that's where this comes in right so with charge capabilities all you really have to do is get like a charge controller I would recommend something like this the victron and just put it here this is the piece of OSB using construction adhesive adhere to this battery bam done so this was originally here right but then it had two wires coming to the battery or or to the technically the breaker and then two Pig mc4 pigtails so you can connect solar panels but you know after a day or two of using that I said I'm never really ever going to charge this battery like on side of wherever I'm using it using solar panels so I said let's take this off right uh technically I took it off and then I put a second version which at that time was using uh Anderson connectors here so I could disconnect the battery from the inverter right I didn't have the breaker at the time so that was the method I was using and that Anderson connector was uh screwed on right here so I eventually got rid of that mainly because I told myself I would never really just bring another 12vt battery here and just swap out the invert that that would never really happen but in my mind I said I I may do that so that was the idea but you know he said that's not really going to happen so let's kill that right so this is the third version of this but if you wanted to be able to hot swap batteries or not hot swap swap out batteries or if you wanted to extend capacity you could obviously just build pigtails to other and there some connectors here add another battery connect it connect it connect it it's you know it's almost infinitely scalable so let's compare this to something like an ecof flow right so in ecoflow you could buy the ecoflow unit I don't know how much it cost nowadays like 800 bucks or whatever uh and you could buy another smart battery for I don't know how much that cost like 7 800 bucks right and you could add them right but for this this battery I think not on sale which nobody pays retail price for this kind of stuff is like 300 bucks and this inverter I believe is some between two to 300 bucks they do make cheaper smaller capacity versions of this inverter so if you want a lighter version of this go with a smaller battery lighter inverter easy peasy so with you know let's just say uh 500 bucks for this battery and this inverter not on sale mind you the cables come with the inverter the only thing on here that does not come with the inverter is this uh circuit breaker but like I said you don't even need the circuit breaker I just like having it this display comes with the uh inverter the short display cable does not come with the inverter it comes with a really long cable I just made a short one uh so you know it's pretty simple 500 bucks you get this okay you can get another battery let's just say you paid retail price uh same battery 300 bucks you have now you have 2.