Archerite
New Member
For experimentation and because it was earlier...I have a 12V battery bank about 20 meters away from a small inverter. To get more power over a 4mm2 cable at that length I have been using a victron orion (10A) to boost the voltage to about 24V (24.75). I use car sockets and car USB chargers to charge various portable devices and that works great! Even a small fridge that runs on 12V/24V works perfectly fine on this 24V supply.
I have been using a Victron Phoenix 24/500 (220V) on this 24V supply as well to see what would run on it. For the last 3-4 months I have been watching TV from this. Not a small portable TV but a 49" LG 4k TV (on low brightness as I prefer that) and it uses about 50 watts on 24V (and about 70 watts on 12V, so yeah there is a loss I know). I can also charge my 12V bosch power tool batteries from it and I can even charge two of them at the same time, using 150 watts.
What does NOT work is a PS4 game console, a UPS for my PC and NAS, the 18V 4A bosch power tool charger and maybe a few others that have a high inrush current when they power up. At first I used a 24V->12V DC-DC converter and a 12V victron phoenix on that and then even my TV had trouble staying on.
My idea for (solving) this issue is by using a supercapacitor bank with enough cells to handle the high voltage and enough capacitance to provide the inverter with power for just a few seconds. I have been reading up on how super caps works, and I already know a bit from my modeltrain hobby. There they are used to supply power when driving over dirty tracks or points. The way to charge the capacitor in a locomotive decoder is a resistor to lower the charge current and a diode to allow fast discharge. But when I look at some of the protection circuits of ready made modules it's limited to just 1A....which increases charging time to an extreme! I believe it was 20 minutes for a 500F 6 cell module!
I have bought a bunch of 5.5V 1.5F super capacitors but I can't find any protection circuits for those! The idea was to put 5 or six in series to make it safe for 24V but I started reading about voltage imbalance.....and started thinking about some sort of BMS! Either an actual BMS meant for lithium cells and configure that for the voltage range of the super caps, or some other type of circuit that checks the voltage and redirect it somewhere once the limit is reached.
As I said this is al experimentation and I know this is an uncommon way to connect an inverter. But i still think this might work! The high current is only required for a few seconds...maybe even less than a second. Does anyone know about a protection and charge circuit that is required for these supercaps at a higher than 2.5V and more than 1A?
Thanks in advance.
I have been using a Victron Phoenix 24/500 (220V) on this 24V supply as well to see what would run on it. For the last 3-4 months I have been watching TV from this. Not a small portable TV but a 49" LG 4k TV (on low brightness as I prefer that) and it uses about 50 watts on 24V (and about 70 watts on 12V, so yeah there is a loss I know). I can also charge my 12V bosch power tool batteries from it and I can even charge two of them at the same time, using 150 watts.
What does NOT work is a PS4 game console, a UPS for my PC and NAS, the 18V 4A bosch power tool charger and maybe a few others that have a high inrush current when they power up. At first I used a 24V->12V DC-DC converter and a 12V victron phoenix on that and then even my TV had trouble staying on.
My idea for (solving) this issue is by using a supercapacitor bank with enough cells to handle the high voltage and enough capacitance to provide the inverter with power for just a few seconds. I have been reading up on how super caps works, and I already know a bit from my modeltrain hobby. There they are used to supply power when driving over dirty tracks or points. The way to charge the capacitor in a locomotive decoder is a resistor to lower the charge current and a diode to allow fast discharge. But when I look at some of the protection circuits of ready made modules it's limited to just 1A....which increases charging time to an extreme! I believe it was 20 minutes for a 500F 6 cell module!
I have bought a bunch of 5.5V 1.5F super capacitors but I can't find any protection circuits for those! The idea was to put 5 or six in series to make it safe for 24V but I started reading about voltage imbalance.....and started thinking about some sort of BMS! Either an actual BMS meant for lithium cells and configure that for the voltage range of the super caps, or some other type of circuit that checks the voltage and redirect it somewhere once the limit is reached.
As I said this is al experimentation and I know this is an uncommon way to connect an inverter. But i still think this might work! The high current is only required for a few seconds...maybe even less than a second. Does anyone know about a protection and charge circuit that is required for these supercaps at a higher than 2.5V and more than 1A?
Thanks in advance.