So I want to power one of my car fans with some solar panels. I ordered quite a few and I want to power one of my fans under the hood. I've already disconnected the fan and pulled it out of the car to test it later.What all do I need besides the panels, fan, and wiring to make this work. This fan will not be tied to any other system. Currently, the fan is not operated by the car or any system of the car due to a modification made to the automobile allowing me to disconnect it from use months ago.Using the fan powered from the solar panels would help with the modification to increase air flow and speed into the area.Could someone please help me by telling me what else I need to make the fan operational from here?
The solar panel doesn't output enough power to run the fan directly, your best bet would be to just hook the fan back up to the battery, and then rig the solar panels up to help charge the battery and remove some of the load from the alternator. If you're trying to reduce your emissions/increase fuel economy then you'd be better of setting up a switch to disconnect your alternator when its not necessary to have it on. The alternator runs off a belt from the engine which requires some of the power output from the engine. Having this connected all the time increases the amount of gas used (marginally) but you'd be saving more gas doing that and using the solar panels to keep the battery topped up.
You may not like it, but the answer's still the same. A car fan will draw anything from a few to several hundred watts, depending on which fan you're talking about (A/C, ventilation, cooling). A solar array will take up roughly one square meter to generate 00 Watts with the sun shining straight down onto it, so you'll need to cover (more or less) the entire roof (or hood) with solar cells in order to power that fan (minimum). If you still want to go ahead: Solar panels, Fuse, cables. Preferrably one cut-out diode per panel (in addition to the hopefully present internal diodes in the panels) in order to prevent one panle dumping its load into the next instead of into the fan. Much better option: get a low power fan (e.g a slow running computer fan) and connect it to that panel of yours. These fans make do with about 0 Watts (at a much lower air throughput), so you'll actually have a chance of running it from the solar panel without coverig your car in panels.
