Deck Speaker or Solar Powered Outdoor Speaker Cooler (SPOSC)

Ideation

Sometimes a project starts with no clear direction, you hit major roadblocks, and then it just spirals out of control. I love when that happens. In this case I have a car amp that is of questionable quality and power, a single car component speaker setup sitting in a box, and a desire for a half way decent sounding outdoor music system. I wanted to do this as quickly and cheaply as possible; that's how it always begins. I quickly found that as the scope of the project increased I was going to need to spend a little more. No biggie. I wanted a solar panel system anyway.

Step One: Speaker Enclosure

Had to be durable and cheap. No typical MDF used for speaker boxes. That just melts when it gets wet. Wood in general is unstable outdoors. Not good enough to make a rigid air chamber. PVC fit the bill, but boy is it ugly. Especially the green sewer pipe kind

The tweeter placement along with the exposed wiring on the outside was not going to win any design awards. I was going to spray paint it but still. That's when my lovely wife helped me realize that I needed to make it look less embarrassing.

So I looked to the web for inspiration. I searched for something along the lines of "reclaimed wood speaker enclosure and basically got the idea to enclose the PVC enclosure in a box made out of leftover fence posts I used on my deck. That's around the time I took this picture with the board.

Soon, the box started taking shape. Here's a link to bigger pictures if you like.

Incorporated Components

Here the amp is installed. I put a door on the back with some gate hinges. 

Oh and hey a cheap cooler cause why not.  

Solar Panels

At this point all I had to do was wire up a 12V battery I had laying around, but I felt a stretch goal was in order. I had been researching solar panels for my home for a while. I had basically decided to hold off and start with a small solar panel system that I could learn from and measure real performance. This enclosure would make the perfect place to put a few SLA batteries and a solar charge controller.

So, I looked on Amazon and found some good options from Renology, but we were getting ready for a 4th of July party, so I wanted something at least assembled in the U.S. I found this set of panels and a charge controller, and it was perfect. Now the speaker battery can be charged, and I can even add an inverter in the future to power lights or a small pool pump. This will likely be part 2. Here's what it looks like ready to go. And it sounds great too.