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Written by Equis
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Tuesday, 12 December 2006 |
Hello
I am going to use battery's and chargers instead of UPS on my sites
I found a charger that is 1.25 amp at 12v and my radios will draw about 1 amp under load max.
That's cutting it pretty fine and charging time will be about 2 years j/k but is that enough overhead (.25 amp)
I like the charger because its meant to make batteries last longer but I hope it will cope at 1mp 24/7
Any thoughts?
Thanks
HighGain:
Not a good idea....
Battery chargers are not clean (well rectified)and will have a substantial amount of AC left over. Your radios will not be happy with that as they are designed to run off of a clean DC supply. UPS's are well rectified and filtered.
I could get into great detail, but the simple suggestion would be DON'T.
brucenolan:
I went thru two 1.5 amp "smart" chargers on an AP drawing 1 amp, then upgraded to a 6 amp (same brand). it still didn't like the ambient temperature and would go to error mode (not charging) so I finally just put a dumb 6 amp charger with a 24 hour timer and adjusted the on time to suit the load,works great! two 90 ah batteries give about 4-5 days run time at 50% discharge without charging and I try to get up there once a week to check voltage
Equis:
Interesting points..
Can anyone give an educated guess on how long a 500va UPS would power a 12v 1.5 amp plugpack?
I liked the battery idea because I though it would give prolonged uptime, but not worth it if its going to blow my gear up
public:
You can use a UPS as a charger. Take the output from the battery, not from the AC out.
Cheap chargers usually overcharge batteries. Flooded cells can be refilled, but gel cells are quickly destroyed.
Off the shelf UPS usually contains microscopic batteries. External battery is needed for any serious backup use.
Also get a ups with an ethernet card so that you can remotely monitor the status.
brucenolan:
also liked the battery set up because it gave me days-- instead of hours of up time. took some experimenting but has been up over 6 months without problems, running 1 rb532 w/cm9 and sr5 + tr6000 and trango M900s ap. seems like most UPS will run down after a short time even without a load
kf6ytc:
I use old commercial ups batteries that are taken out of use due to a maintaince agreement, These are deka 110ah sealed lead acid batteries.... they have a 7 year life per deka, and i get them after 1 year....
High end batteries will have a charge voltage, ie. 12.9 volts....... If you get a good power supply, $50 for a switching one, about 10amps, just adjust the power supply to the charge voltage (12.9) and the powersupply will charge the battery, but once the voltage of the battery is also 12.9 the battery will draw virtually no current from the supply, so you can leave the power supply on the batteries without having to turn it off, or overcharging.
I know some places sell charge controllers, i would be interested in others feedback on them........
public:
The float voltage depends on the battery construction AND on temperature. A long life charger must be temperature compensated.
A pulse charging method is believed to reduce sulfation and extend battery life. Steady charging is simple, but does not give the longest battery life.
lutful:
The "VA" rating of SoHo UPS only indicate how much power UPS can supply to PC.
The runtime in minutes will be mentioned in small text - only that number will give you an indication of the battery Amp-hour rating.
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