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Aero Sport RC Charging Station Project

Discussion in 'General Talk Forum' started by meistertek, Jan 17, 2010.

  1. TigerPilot

    TigerPilot Well-Known Member

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    So nothing is doing with the solar panels or the wind generator?
     
  2. meistertek

    meistertek Member

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    Yoram,

    One member is thinking about a building a wind generator. I am for solar, but that will be expensive for our small club. I am fine taking the batteries home and charging them on my charger for now, my charger only cost $190, that's much cheaper than wind or solar :lol:

    Next step is selecting our battery bank size based on our peak and weekly usage. I think we will be in for surprise when I gather the next week of usage data this Wednesday.
     
  3. meistertek

    meistertek Member

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    Ok, here is the deep cycle battery usage data from July 28th to August 4th 2010.

    61amp hours were used this week, still not as much as I would think. We only have 25 members in our club and only about half fly electric and of that half only about half fly every week. That's only 6 people charging so that's about 10amp hours or 10,000mAh per person being used. If we were all flying 1300mAh 3S packs on average (actually that sounds close to our average) that would be about 1000mAh of charge back into a pack, so each person would be flying about 9 or 10 flights per week. Hmmm maybe that's right. :geek:

    Another thing is that most of us fully charge all our packs at home before arriving at the field to fly, so those are flights that don't use the charging station. A few guys fly only one flight per day, so they never really use the charging station.

    Well I 'll just keep collecting data! :lol: Attached files [​IMG] [​IMG]
     
  4. meistertek

    meistertek Member

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    Well I learned what not to do to my new IOTA charger this weekend! I was charging one deep cycle 125Ah battery with my charger connected to our 1200watt generator at the field and the battery nearing the end of its charge and the generator started pulsing its RPM, kind of whhhhrrrrrrwhhhhhrrrrrwhhrrrrr sounding, and then a puff of smoke came out of my charger. Good thing we were standing right there as three of us disconnected the charger from the battery and generator in a few seconds.

    After inspecting the charger I could see one of larger capacitors had its top blown right off. :shock: I e-mailed IOTA and told them what I had done and they said to RMA back to them so they could see if it can be repaired. They agreed with me that the incoming AC voltage from the generator was probably fluctuating to much for the charger and it was trying to stabilize it with the caps overloading the one that blew.

    lesson learned: don't charge with a generator that can't hold a stable AC output. :(
     

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