Portable Battery Box Build

This battery box build was inspired by numerous other amateur radio operators and commercially available devices.

For what seemed like months I had been looking at various off the shelf battery solutions, unfortunately the biggest limiting factor was either poor battery chemistry or a prohibitive cost. I was generally unhappy with all the available solutions, I decided the best method was to build my own box. Naturally I spent countless hours on YouTube and visited many amateur radio websites looking for ideas and hints. This project as a whole was sped along when a fellow club member, John – VE3IPS – gave me some spare batteries that had been given to him during regular maintenance of a uninterrupted power supply system.

The batteries I was given came out of a commercial UPS system and to his knowledge had never been put under a real load, silently sitting waiting to jump in and keep servers and the like online in a power outage while waiting for a backup diesel system to kick in. So for all intensive purpose, other than sitting dormant for 2 1/2 years slowly aging, they were basically brand new SLA batteries.

These Zeus branded SLA’s have proven to be excellent batteries and allegedly have an internal controller, although I’m not sure exactly what that means. None the less, now having batteries in my immediate possession, I had no reason to not build battery a box.

Please watch the video below to enjoy a short 8 minute walk-though of the build and hopefully find some inspiration. At the bottom of the webpage I have included a parts list from Amazon and pricing from the time of the build in February 2023.