Thaddeus

My battery is almost dead after 2 months of sitting... is the cigarette lighter on an 'always on' circuit, or must the key be in the accessory position for it to be live? I would like to just jam a tricle charger in there...

tia

Thaddeus

Peckster

Speaking from experience, most cigarette lighters are live. That way, private detectives doing surveillance don't have to turn the ignition switch every time they light a smoke.

There's an easy way to find out, unless your battery is truly dead...

crazandy

But aren't the factory cigarette lighter holes too big for anything to sit in there? I tried a cell phone charger once and it was very loose and kept falling out.

Steve Lavigne

I had no problem using a trickle charger in the cigarette lighter of my 951.

crazandy

<a href="http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/Displayitem.taf?itemnumber=44768" target="_blank">http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/Displayitem.taf?itemnumber=44768</a>

Anybody ever tried a trickle charger like that?

951Tom

Is 2 months normal for a battery to drain? I'm doing a test on mine to see how long it can sit and still start. The longest so far is 6 weeks and started up fine, just a little slow. Now I'm at 7 weeks and I get 11.8V on my multimeter. I keep an alarm on all the time so that drains it some. Thanks.

bs

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">Originally posted by crazandy:
<strong>Anybody ever tried a trickle charger like that?</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">well, look at it this way:
that charger is rated at 1.5 watts, which i'm assuming is max power under full sun. assuming an output voltage of 14V, that means its output current is 1.5/14=~100mA. now lets assume that during the "average" day, that thing sees 10 hours of bright, cloudless sun. that is a duty cycle of 10/24=0.4
so its daily average current output is .4*100=40mA or .04*14=.56 watt

that's not very much, really...

i think the ac powered ones are usually 2-5 watts and they run 24/7....

jim968

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">Originally posted by bs:
<strong> </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">Originally posted by crazandy:
<strong>Anybody ever tried a trickle charger like that?</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">well, look at it this way:
that charger is rated at 1.5 watts, which i'm assuming is max power under full sun. assuming an output voltage of 14V, that means its output current is 1.5/14=~100mA. now lets assume that during the "average" day, that thing sees 10 hours of bright, cloudless sun. that is a duty cycle of 10/24=0.4
so its daily average current output is .4*100=40mA or .04*14=.56 watt

that's not very much, really... .</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">Yep, that would be full sun, for about _four_ hours per day when the sun is highest and hitting it ~directly; earlier & later in the day, it would fall off, unless you manually track the sun with it; so it's even worse on average. Probably delivering something like .2 to .3 watts to the battery, on a 24 hour average in clear weather.

Cloudy days, it would less. Nights, nothing. And northern latitudes would likely do worse during the winter.

"High output 1.5 watts" kind of tells us why solar-generated electricity ain't quite ready for prime time yet...

BTW, my guess is that by you account for energy conversion losses (electrical to chemical to electrical) going into and out of the battery, plus wire losses, you'll get almost _nothing_...

Jim, remaining unconvinced on the 'alternative energy' issue...

Thaddeus

Yeah, Solar's got a way to go... it costs about 500 bucks for a 165 watt panel. That's about 1/2 of what it was 10 years ago, but still... If you figure it's producing that wattage about 1/4 of the time (optimistically), and you then think about how casually people turn on a 100 watt lamp and leave it burning, it makes you wonder...

As far as alternative sources go, wind is making better and better sense... but you need a windy spot for it.. and, as the product description page of one alt energy site puts it, 'A site that makes good dependable wind energy is probably not a great site to put up a house."

About the only alternative tech that excites me at the moment is a geothermal heat pump... you bury a coil of antifreeze-filled tubing below the frost line, and use a heat pump to extract the heat from the ground in winter, and dump waste heat into it in the summer. There's some dude here in Minnesota with a 4500 sq ft house it costs him about 40 bucks a month to heat and cool. But that doesn't help with the lights... or charging the 951's battery, either...