diy solar

diy solar

Let's make some bubbles!

BroomJM

New Member
Joined
Apr 7, 2021
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130
This is a Frabill 19 Quart Bait Station. It works great at keeping fishing bait (mostly minnows) cool and lively. It is very well insulated, like a Yeti cooler, has a sealed lid, and the other other interesting thing about it is the aerator that is attached to the lid. This aerator uses a 3-volt, .5-amp motor, so it draws 1.5 watts, on the high setting. It is designed to use 2 D-cell batteries, connected in series, which produces about 3.2v (when new) with a total capacity varying between 12ah to as high as 20ah, for the most expensive ones. When used to power this aerator pump, running on high, you would expect them to run between 24 and 40 hours, since it only draws 1/2 of an amp. Unfortunately, D-cell batteries lose voltage as they discharge, which means the current will increase to maintain the same 1.5 watts. For this use case, a pair of typical D-cell batteries will last about 16 hours, at most, which is usually enough for two days of fishing.

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The thing that kind of sucks about the way this bait station and aerator are designed is you have to open the lid of the bait station and remove two very long machines screws, with thumb knobs on them, to open up the aerator and replace the batteries. This is usually done in the boat, in the middle of the day, with minnows in the bait station, hoping you don't drop a battery into the water! :) The screws aren't always easy to get started back in and it's just a hassle. What's worse is if you have forgotten to put a fresh pair of batteries in your boat, which means your minnows start dying, usually when the fishing is just getting good!

What I wanted to do is power the aerator with some kind of rechargeable lithium battery solution. I found that a single 26650 cell has a nominal voltage of 3.7v, which is only a little more than the 3.2v put out by two new D-cell batteries, connected in series. I made a pack of three 26650 cells, arranged in parallel, giving me close to 9ah, or about 18 hours of run-time (since they have little to no voltage sag). That worked great, but wasn't as convenient as I wanted. That's when I learned about buck converters. I found one that would take 18 volts on the input side and drop it down to 3 volts for the output.

I then bought a 3D-printed adapter for the 18v battery used in the Ryobi cordless tool system. I wired that adapter to the buck converter, dialed it down to output 3 volts, then wired the output of the buck converter to a 5.5x2.1 barrel plug, which fits into the 3v adapter (meant to get power from an automotive accessory plug). Using one of the 18v, 2ah Ryobi batteries, which creates 36 watt-hours, the aerator will run for 24 hours, probably more, but that's all I tested.

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