Thank you,
Seems to add credibility to my concerns about having a solar panel and its regulator/charger, a wind turbine and its regulator/charger and a shore power charger all conflicting.
I'm glad that I did not purchase a few items of hardware just to experiment. It would have been a very costly exercise in futility.
I'm now fixated on a practical and affordable solution involving as few "boxes" as possible.
I don't know enough about electronics to design my own solution, but I have been admiring some of the more elegant regulator schematics that can be found on the net. Odd that I can draw out a PCB from a schematic but not quite fathom the logical detail of the design. A single semester of electronics in year 7 a million years ago has clearly not served me well.
Perhaps it's just a matter of mating source specific regulators from solar and wind turbine to a DC-DC charger when off shore power. Have each regulator supply a reliable current suitable to power a single sophisticated charger.
A pity really, as a holistic one-box solution could potentially have many benefits, i.e.:
1) preferential use of either solar/wind or shore energy, depending on need or urgency to recharge or the cost/reliability of shore power if metered, free or not dependable.
2) a single devise to manage and charge batteries and supply house loads with surplus energy directed to heating of cabin or water as desired.
3) one-off cost of a single sophisticated charging devise rather than three separate ones.
4) the possibility of using a low cost house supply/charger demand-managed intelligent DC ICE generator if all else fails.
We've not yet discussed other alternatives such as fuel cells and how they might be integrated or possibly even be a replacement for batteries. I know they are costly and that currently available commercial "marine" products can barely manage a sustained 10 amps, but they do warrant discussion.
Mercedes Benz-Daimler had a fuel cell system installed in their early A class product... I wonder if anything can be learned from this, in spite of the fact that the car vanished quickly.
Thinking further, BMW ended up buying out an odd little german geek in 2001 with a fuel cell technology that they wanted to install in their three door compact cars.. His videos have long since disappeared off you tube. Something to ponder none-the-less.
James.
--- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, Matthew Geier <matthew@...> wrote:
>
> On 26/07/13 17:02, Craig Carmichael wrote:
> > If the power sources supply quite similar voltages, or if they're
> > operaing at different times, diode isolation into a DC to DC step down
> > converter with a flexible voltage input may be sufficient.
>
> Do that with my 'mains' charger and it won't even start. It requires a
> battery voltage. If there little background noise you can hear the
> switching converter turning on and off many times a second. It sends a
> burst of current then stops and listens.
> If you put isolation diodes on it's output, it won't get the sense feed
> back and fault. If you have another current source in the system, it
> will get unexpected results in the sense cycle, fault and shut down.
> Of note - my charger HAS to be setup with the brand and type of
> battery connected to it for it to work properly. In my case it's been
> told that it has Trojan T series flooded cells attached. If I connected
> AGMs to it and didn't reprogram it, it would cook the AGMs. (And you
> 'program' it by shorting the output at certain times, a pretty scary
> concept with a 30amp charger!)
>
>
> If you want charging smarts AND multiple inputs you really need it
> some how integrated - even if it consists of different input modules
> plugged into the front end of a 'smart' charge controller.
>
| Reply via web post | Reply to sender | Reply to group | Start a New Topic | Messages in this topic (21) |
No comments:
Post a Comment