LED lights?

@Mike SMit: That thing looks really awesome. Almost to good to be true. How much did it cost to replace the batteries?

Can that thing be rigged so it can be charged with solar?
 
It came with 102Ah batteries. I had two 70Ah batteries laying around that I used to take to the field to keep all our (me and mates) lipos charged when we flew helis, so I just stuck those in when the big ones died. I will get 2 new 102Ah sometime though - they are about R1,500 a pop from what I have seen online.

Bad news is the inverter is what broke and it overcharged the batteries. I came home and the entire unit was cooking. My electrician took the inverter to a mate of his to get repaired, then the mate disapeared to Zimbabwe leaving me inverterless. I had a spare 600W 12V laying around so stuck that in to keep my setup protected, and the electrician is giving me his 2000W one tomorrow.

I am looking at buying another 1 or 2 of these now for the house. 1 for lighting (all LED), and another for the lounge. Next step is solar power to charge them - but need to read up how to do that part still.
 
You can use a smaller 7 Ah battery if all your lights are 12 volt. My system has 3 LED downlights and 2 striplights with an alarm IR sensor to save power (occupancy detector).

light-batt.jpglight-on.jpg
 
Right now we are being load shed, but all my devices online. Suck it Eskom!
 
Neo_X said:
interested to hear your results, especially when loading all the units mentioned.
Click to expand...

So far going one hour 30 min under all the devices I needed it to carry. Im kinda interested to see how this will turn out, I still havent fully tested it. This is basically the first test. I was going to take it tomorrow to my brother in laws company. They deal with this stuff every day and he was curious at my setup. He wanted to run tests on it. I was not sure if the modified sine wave will break anything so he was ganna do tests on it and check its integrity. Also to see how long the battery lasts for.

So far the modified sine wave has not broken anything and I have gone one and a half hours without a flutter. Im going to stop when the power comes on, but thats the progress so far.

EDIT: I went for 2 hours 15 minutes before I switched it off. I have no idea how much of the battery I used.
 
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Modified sine might break microwave ovens and induction motor devices such as fridges. That is because of the harmonics. A good sine inverter has a low THD of 3% or less (not quite HiFi like a dvd or other audio). This is good enough. PCs TV and other electonics will even work on square wave inverters or 240vdc.
 
Update:

Okay, Ive being running all my stuff on my setup continuously. The modified sine wave does not have a negative impact on the router, large mecer monitor, dstv decoder, PC, monitors etc. Due to the unreliable nature of our blackout schedule I kinda use the setup as a full time UPS. When the power went off at 8pm, my router didnt drop a packet and PC stayed up.

Right now I am very happy with the setup.

One other thing of interest. I use Powerline technology for my home network to connect to the internet. I use the extension cord like a network cable now :D There is no negative impact on powerline networks.
 
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Thanks for the update. Sounds very interesting.

Leads to an interesting question though -- how does one tell what Depth of Discharge you've gotten to? It's something to do with measuring volts right? (or is that only when it's failing)
 
richjdavies said:
Thanks for the update. Sounds very interesting.

Leads to an interesting question though -- how does one tell what Depth of Discharge you've gotten to? It's something to do with measuring volts right? (or is that only when it's failing)
Click to expand...

Generally the system will shut down if the voltage drops to like 10.5V . If ghoti doesn't have that feature , then he's basically screwed. I think his system is a rental so then the owner is screwed.
 
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