krby
Solar Enthusiast
I have built a DIY UPS for my home network rack. When I built it, I had an inverter already, found a good deal on the batteries, so I just bought a RV converter/charger to and build a double conversion-style UPS. It's been running fine since July and in the last few months I added an Arduino with some sensors to give me a "UPS-like USB connection". The Arduino senses AC present/missing and the voltage on the DC side of things and reports that over USB as if it is a consumer UPS, this lets me do things like have the NAS power off if the AC is out for more than 15 minutes, giving me longer runtime for the batteries.
This all works ok, I'm posting here I'm thinking about upgrading to a single inverter/charger (chargeverter?) to give a cleaner install. Also, the inverter I have now trips above 14.5V so I can only bulk charge reliably at 14.4V without tripping the inverter.
I really only need about 250W of power on the AC output side. With everything on, I'm usually using about 100-150W, sometimes spikes up above 200W. When running on battery, the NAS turns off and that gets down to about 55W of AC. The battery bank are two 12V 200Ah AGMs. I have these in parallel now, but could wire them in series if the right chargeverter was 24V only.
Are there "small" chargeverters? Something around 500W of output? More is fine, but I'm hoping for smaller/cheaper by going lower? The batteries have a max charge current of 60A each, but recharging at the max current isn't critical. I've been doing fine with 55A of charge capacity from my current converter/charger. Ideally the new thing would be something that would handle multiple batt chemistries or be configurable enough I could do that. I'm comfortable digging through settings to do setup charge profiles, and understand bulk, absorb, float, CC/CV charging and tail current settings.
Since I have this working now, I'm sort of cost sensitive. It's both a learning project but also something I want to look a it neater that it does now.
This all works ok, I'm posting here I'm thinking about upgrading to a single inverter/charger (chargeverter?) to give a cleaner install. Also, the inverter I have now trips above 14.5V so I can only bulk charge reliably at 14.4V without tripping the inverter.
I really only need about 250W of power on the AC output side. With everything on, I'm usually using about 100-150W, sometimes spikes up above 200W. When running on battery, the NAS turns off and that gets down to about 55W of AC. The battery bank are two 12V 200Ah AGMs. I have these in parallel now, but could wire them in series if the right chargeverter was 24V only.
Are there "small" chargeverters? Something around 500W of output? More is fine, but I'm hoping for smaller/cheaper by going lower? The batteries have a max charge current of 60A each, but recharging at the max current isn't critical. I've been doing fine with 55A of charge capacity from my current converter/charger. Ideally the new thing would be something that would handle multiple batt chemistries or be configurable enough I could do that. I'm comfortable digging through settings to do setup charge profiles, and understand bulk, absorb, float, CC/CV charging and tail current settings.
Since I have this working now, I'm sort of cost sensitive. It's both a learning project but also something I want to look a it neater that it does now.
