Micqn Posted October 10, 2003 Share Posted October 10, 2003 I found this on the internet after I went looking for a simple AA battery charger. The parts cost 4.63 locally and it works really especially since I added double the solar cells in PARALLEL with the ones shown. Here is the link to get all the info on it. Quote Link to comment
+RJFerret Posted October 10, 2003 Share Posted October 10, 2003 Just a caution, improperly recharging batteries is the second biggest cause of failure. (Letting them discharge is the first.) Do NOT overcharge them (particularly those of higher amp hour ratings), as you'll cook off the chemical that allows for a bit of overcharging and ruin them. If you use this solar charging system, I'd highly recommend using a volt meter to verify things, when a Nicd or NiMh reaches it's full charge, the voltage will start to drop, this is how ''intelligent'' chargers know they are done. Alternatively, they start to ''cook'' and get hot so you could frequently feel them to find out when they are done, this is how most cordless screwdrivers and tools stop charging. I love the concept of solar power, but would worry 'bout 'em. hth, Randy Quote Link to comment
+Dagg Posted October 10, 2003 Share Posted October 10, 2003 I use an Isun and it works great! The sport model (to match my gps's Quote Link to comment
+Planet Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 Now if we could just make cars that run on these! Planet Quote Link to comment
+RJFerret Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Planet:Now if we could just make cars that run on these! They already exist Planet! You might not want to try to drive one here as there isn't enough sun and a few too many hills, but there are very good options. A completely electric car costs quite a bit more initially, but lasts forever as there are far fewer mechanical parts or systems to deal with. It needs next to no maintenance (no oil changes or trips to the dealer for service). You never have to take the time to stop at a gas station and wait for a fill-up! Simply plug it it when you get home and walk away. Tax breaks, no emissions/pollution and a fraction of the operating costs. However, it takes effort to find one to buy. Oh yeah, one of the coolest parts is they are SILENT to drive! No engine noise, just wind! It's like riding a bicycle... Beautiful. The downside is after several years the batteries need replacing--which is lower cost than ICE car maintenance, but not amortized out over the years. More readily available are three options: the Honda Insight, Honda Civic Hybrid or Toyota Prius. They are electric-gas hybrids but don't offer any of the aforementioned benefits. The only benefit is 50-100% better gas mileage, but they cost more to buy. Enjoy, Randy PS: Electric drag racers have been banned by the drag racing organization because they easily beat any fuel-driven vehicle! PPS: I followed a fully electric car on I-95 southbound just the other day. Quote Link to comment
Aladin Sane Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 I get a kick out of people who claim electic cars are polution free. You have simply relocated the point of emission from your tailpipe to a smokestack at your local electrical power gereration station. Where do you think the electrical power in all those outlets comes from? Aladin Sane Quote Link to comment
+BadAndy Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 I didn't notice the smokestacks at Hoover dam. Someone ought to make them a virtual cache. "Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!" Quote Link to comment
Aladin Sane Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 Point well taken Andy, but here in the midwest, we don't have that many wild rivers to block up behind dams, so we are a little more dependant on fossil fuel or nuclear. Quote Link to comment
+RJFerret Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 Valid point, but electric generation via solar, wind, and water are nicely pollution free. The nuclear and coal have issues comparable to gasoline and diesel. However via electric cars, efficiency is improved such that there's less! You haven't simply moved it, but made it a tiny fraction of the existing (nevermind the costs associated with trying to reduce emissions via consumers rather than at a point of origin.) Enjoy, Randy Quote Link to comment
M15a4spr Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 quote:Originally posted by BadAndy:I didn't notice the smokestacks at Hoover dam. Someone ought to make them a virtual cache. "Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!" But I do notice eco-wacko's protesting anytime anyone wants to build any dam. Quote Link to comment
+Cooter13 Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 Time for self-moderation. I have opinions in regards to polution, dams, nuclear power etc. but the question/topic was thoughts on solar recharging AA batteries so commonly used in GPSr. I have found the maha batteries are a very nice set. The charger that I purchased came with 8 AAs and a charger that can charge upto 4 AA or AAA at once on either 110 or 12V. Came with both cords for charging as well. Including shipping, I think it was sub $60. I use them in my digital camera mostly, have some old AAs that I use in the GPSr right now. I can get almost 400 pictures on the A70 with medium-high resolution on one set. Not too bad. Doubled the length on standard alkaline batteries. It seems that most cachers also have a digital camera, so a recharger, of some sort, is a must. See the happy moron He doesn't give a da** I wish I were a moron My God, perhaps I am Author Unknown Quote Link to comment
+cachew nut Posted October 15, 2003 Share Posted October 15, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Aladin Sane: Where do you think the electrical power in all those outlets comes from? Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity and where does it go after it leaves the toaster? Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches one that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important lesson about electricity. It also illustrates how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travel down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit. AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting. Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as, "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office. After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. Among them, Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond -- almost. But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877 was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879 when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year any new electricity was generated was 1937. Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Galvani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists have developed the laser, an electronic appliance so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations to the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from "Bulldozer" to "Eyeball." Quote Link to comment
Aladin Sane Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 quote:Originally posted by RJFerret:Valid point, but electric generation via solar, wind, and water are nicely pollution free. The nuclear and coal have issues comparable to gasoline and diesel. However via electric cars, efficiency is improved such that there's less! You haven't simply moved it, but made it a tiny fraction of the existing (nevermind the costs associated with trying to reduce emissions via consumers rather than at a point of origin.) Enjoy, Randy I'm afraid your wrong about an increase in efficiency moving to electric cars. Once the power is in the batter, the system is very efficient, but the power cycle of burning some fuel to generate steam, to spin a turbine, to spin a generator which sends a current through a wire from the generating station to your house is not as efficient as an internal combustion engine driving your car directly. If everyone switched to electric cars over night, the total energy demand would increase. Aladin Sane Quote Link to comment
+RJFerret Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 quote:Originally posted by Aladin Sane:I'm afraid your wrong about an increase in efficiency moving to electric cars. Once the power is in the batter, the system is very efficient, but the power cycle of burning some fuel to generate steam, to spin a turbine, to spin a generator which sends a current through a wire from the generating station to your house is not as efficient as an internal combustion engine driving your car directly. If everyone switched to electric cars over night, the total energy demand would increase. We should really take this to email as it's OT here, but a 4-stroke gas engine's piston only produces power less than 25% of the time, robbing it from the system the rest of the time! Add to that inefficient cars, older engines, etc... The percentage of power utilized in an ICE engine is a very scary tiny percentage of the potential of the fuel (the number in my head is 12%, but that could be off a bit). ICE engines, by design can't do better. Now factor in that electricity is generated through varying systems, some of which (solar, wind, and water) are essentially infinitely efficient {wink}. Which comes back to the genesis of this thread, recharging your batteries via a solar charger is the best concept (if you don't damage the batteries inadvertantly). I haven't heard of someone promoting a steam-generator battery recharger you run on your stove! Grin, Randy PS: A great real-world example contrasting the quote above, would be hybrid cars, which use about half the fuel of ICE with lower emissions and matching performance. Quote Link to comment
+majicman Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 OT? OT? Back in my days we didn't have no stinkin' OT area! Oh we tried, but it just didn't happen. You young whippersnappers have it so easy... toasters, electricity, sattellites and even an OT area!! --majicman (MY new book is NOW AVAILABLE! Check it out: http://www.mcwj.com ) Quote Link to comment
+Dad and the Dynamic Duo Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 quote:Originally posted by cachew nut: Where do you think the electrical power in all those outlets comes from? That was a great post! Thanks (though I feel compelled to reply with many more lines of prose) George Quote Link to comment
Aladin Sane Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 Ok, This will be my last post, and then I will let it die. The typical fossil fuel powered generating station is between 25 and 30 percent efficeint. This is measured at the generator. When you factor in 25% loss for transmission, you are lucky to get 22.5%. While there is significant Hydroelectric power in this country, there is no viable commercial solar or wind energy being generated. BTW, Iowa has the largest wind energy farm in the world. There are over 300 wind turbines in northwest Iowa. Each cost over $1,000,000 to install, and will not generate $1,000,000 dollars of electricity in its' usefull life. If it were not for a government subsidy, they would not have been built. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be spending research dollars to develope solar and wind, but they are not ready to shoulder much of the current demand. Anyway about your hybrid car. The electrical part is there to provide greater torque for acceleration. During normal cruising, the car runs on its' ineffiecent ICE. Aladin Sane Quote Link to comment
+nincehelser Posted October 16, 2003 Share Posted October 16, 2003 Another thing about electric cars... A good chunk of what you pay for gasoline are taxes which fund road construction and repair. If people stop buying gas, the money for roads will have to come from somewhere else...probably a big tax on electric cars. It sure screws up the economic equation. George Quote Link to comment
+RJFerret Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 Thank you A.S. for your input and sharing the knowledge, I obviously am relatively ignorant of the power generation industry. I actually did some research regarding putting a wind generator here (shore of Milford) but it's on the edge of the viability map--again, not worth it as it would generate enough $-power over it's life. Bummer. I guess we'll have to stick to solar for smaller batteries as this thread promotes! {Grin} quote:Originally posted by Aladin Sane:Anyway about your hybrid car. The electrical part is there to provide greater torque for acceleration. During normal cruising, the car runs on its' ineffiecent ICE. This depends on which hybrid car, as they are of opposite design. I believe you described the Toyota system. I believe Honda's Insight runs from the electric motor and uses the ICE for recharging. (So the ICE is off after warm-up, coasting, braking and at stops). (Or vise-versa... I don't own one, just test drove an Insight before I bought my, er, ''racecar'' and dated someone with a Prius briefly.) Again, thank's for the enlightenment, Randy Quote Link to comment
Aladin Sane Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 No problem sharing my experience, I used to be in the fossil fuel R&D business (cleaner, more efficient use of coal). The Clinton administration was no fan of fossil fuel and cut all of the funding (a rather short sighted view). I then chose to get into the specialty chemical world. We will one day need to quite burning gasoline in vehicles. Once oil starts getting scarce, we will need to use the the oil to manufacture items that are difficult to make from anything else. Now I will get off my soap box and get out to find a few caches. Aladin Sane Quote Link to comment
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