solar panel and emergency battery for camping

I bought a Duracell PowerPack 600 and an InstaPark 30W solar panel with the idea of using them as a power source/buffer system for charging electronics batteries/boombox/lights/etc while camping without running the car battery down.

The PowerPack comes with jumper cables, an AC charger, and 3 AC outlets and 1 DC outlet. The solar panel comes with a controller, cable, and charge controller. I also bought a male-male 12VDC extension cable.

After getting all the parts together, it appeared that I was supposed to run hardwired wires from the panel to the charge controller to the plug for the battery. That seemed like a bad idea to me, so I went to Ace Hardware and looked around for a bit trying to find a good plug-n-play connection method. Basically something to attach the charge controller to that would have room for connectors on each side.

It was not looking good for that...tons of options, but none that looked solid and yet re-useable and easily attached/detached. Then it hit me..phone cord is still rated for the old Ring Voltage level.

So I bought a phone wall jack box and front plate with two RJ11 ports, connected the solar panel to a male RJ11 plug and then ran into a problem. The 12VDC connector for the battery has standard 12VDC wires, about 5 times larger than what a standard RJ11 can usefully be attached to. So I just ran it straight in through opening at the back of the RJ11 port and connected it directly to the back for the time being. Later I'll do a down convert on the wiring since it doesn't need to be that high gauge since it's carrying at most 12V@1.6A. I'll try to remember to take some pictures of it tonight.

Then when I get back from Burning Man I'll have to work out a better connector/plug combination.

Tested out the outputs with my new multimeter and even at twilight the panel is producing 12V@0.1A. The charge controller is only rated for 3A max, but then the panel only produces 1.67A max, so it should be a good reasonably fast charge in bright daylight.