I have been tinkering with an emergency battery/inverter system and part of the plan is to be able to charge from a generator if there is not much sunshine. If I could get enough charge in the battery to carry critical loads overnight, that would be great. I have a 24v battery and found you can connect 12v computer server power supplies in series. I purchased two HP supplies, each rated for 850watts at 120v or 1000watts at 240v. There is a modification that can be done so the 12 max limit is removed and with resistors or a pot, you can adjust the output. They will still regulate to the set voltage, but it is now not locked down to 12.3v or whatever. With a 1k pot the range is about 14v-19v. The internal boards are connected to chassis ground and the ground wire from the power cord is also connected to chassis ground. While others had worked to insulate the board from the chassis, metal standoffs and through hole plating on the board made this look like a less than ideal solution for me. So I decided to float the entire mess and put it in an insulted enclosure.
I got some sticky pad standoffs and mounted the boards to some resin impregnated material (sample material junk from work). XT60 connectors were soldered to the connection blades. I 3D printed an end cap that would hold the fans. I then printed some pieces that can be used as extensions like the leaf in the dining room table. The voltage adjustment pots are mounted in the first leaf. Only the end cap was glued in place at the time of the photos but I wanted to do a test run before gluing the cover together and to the board.....so the rubber bands I set the output to 30v, connected to my X8 Icharger, and set the charge current at 25amps.
I also connected my laptop power supply based charger to add another 8 amps.
500watts of solar is doing about 0.5 amps today, so a good day to test AC based charging.
I got some sticky pad standoffs and mounted the boards to some resin impregnated material (sample material junk from work). XT60 connectors were soldered to the connection blades. I 3D printed an end cap that would hold the fans. I then printed some pieces that can be used as extensions like the leaf in the dining room table. The voltage adjustment pots are mounted in the first leaf. Only the end cap was glued in place at the time of the photos but I wanted to do a test run before gluing the cover together and to the board.....so the rubber bands I set the output to 30v, connected to my X8 Icharger, and set the charge current at 25amps.
I also connected my laptop power supply based charger to add another 8 amps.
500watts of solar is doing about 0.5 amps today, so a good day to test AC based charging.