Portable sound system

[Freddyata]

Im in the process of building an ice chest sound system and I have a few questions. I will be using a 12v 10ah battery to power a cd player/iPod and 4 speakers. I also want to run a solar panel to trickle the battery. How can I determine how much the cd player and speakers will be pulling from the battery and is the battery to small for this? I would like to run a cig lighter to plug the iPod charger in when it's running low. Any input would be great thanks.

 

[duffy]

Get a multimeter. Put it in the "DC Amps" range, highest setting. Plug the leads into Amps and Gnd. Hook the Amps lead to +12V from the battery, hook the Gnd lead to the +12V to the CD player. Play something at your average listening level with all 4 speakers running. Check the meter, you may have to turn it down to the next-lowest setting to get a good read. This will tell you your amps, from there it's straightforward to figure amp-hours.

There's really no better way to do this.

 

[Freddyata]

Alright I'll try that out. So once I figure out the amp draw then I can figure out if the solar panel will trickle charge the battery enough?

 

[duffy]

It will certainly give you a ratio of playing time to charging time. Like if you find it pulls 2A running and the solar charger puts out 500mA, then you are going to need to leave it in the sun for 4 hours to play it for 1 hour. Or, if it was a fully charged 10Ah battery and you ran it all day augmented with a 500mA solar panel, then you would get an extra 1 hour and 15 minutes of play time you wouldn't otherwise (6 hours 15 minutes instead of 5 hours).

 

[Freddyata]

Ok that makes sense. The solar panel I had in mind that would fit only puts out 70ma,I dont think it will work then haha. Back to the drawing board I go

 

[duffy]

How about this thing?
https://www.amazon.com/Instapark®-B...GL0K/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1333137447&sr=8-6

Comes with a 12V charge controller, puts out over an amp and a half, about the right size for the top of an ice chest.

 

[Freddyata]

A little pricey. I found one that sun force makes 5watt 350mah. I think it might work. The top of the ice chest is only 30"x30". Thanks for you help

**broken link removed**

 

[audioguru]

Four half-decent speaker enclosures in an ice chest take up all the room with no room left for food, drinks, ice or the battery.
Four tiny speaker enclosures sound awful and are not loud unless you wear them on your ears as headphones.

 

[Freddyata]

I've actually already built one with 4 6.5s and a amp and it sounds pretty damn loud at the river. The main purpose is for sounds not an actually ice chest for drinks and food

 

[audioguru]

I have some cheap speakers with 6.5" woofers. They go down to about 80Hz so the lowest two octaves of hearing are missing.
No deep bass.

My "sound system for the beach" used a 4" ported woofer with lots of bass boost and it sounded great. It was much smaller than yours. It was used about 35 years ago.

 

[Freddyata]

Sounds great. The cooler I built is for the river and goes inside a floaty and gets lots of looks and attention. And is louder than some boats out there