Re: Portable batter packs and Solar Charging?

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

You could charge two 7.2VDC battery packs (one at a time or possibly  
both in parallel), then connect them in series and fall comfortably  
within the 10-15VDC range needed for that Xantrex.

Enjoy!

Andrew.

On 11-Jul-06, at 2:36 PM, Craig M. Armstrong  wrote:

> Thank you for the long and informative post. I plan to read it all
> through later, just wanted to quickly respond to a couple of things:
>
> On 7/11/06,  <> wrote:
>> Are you aiming for actually running the wearable off solar cells, or
>> just using them instead of a "wall wart" charger?
>
> I wanted to explore some options. The solar backpack seems like a good
> idea if you want to charge phones, PDA's, etc. But if I wanted to have
> an AC source available, it didn't look like a possibility.
>
>> I think your main trouble here might be finding an inverter that runs
>> on 7.2V. With the battery pack charged, you have 2.2AH available,
>> which is not bad. My current wearable is designed to use 7.2V, so it
>> could run off that. The thing is, since you would be drawing from the
>> battery faster than you would be recharging it, the solar cells might
>> not help much.
>
> Wasn't looking for continuous use. The idea I had in mind was to wear
> the backpack, charge the battery, maybe keep some low power devices
> like a phone and PDA plugged in all the time (which I think the solar
> could keep up with). Then if I needed an emergency AC plug for just a
> few minutes, I plugged in the inverter and I had it. When done, let
> the battery charge up again till I needed another few minutes of AC
> (or move to somewhere with a wall outlet, or my car with a bigger
> battery ;-)
>
> ...
>
>> That thing looks pretty cool. The line "The Powerpack has a nickel
>> metal hydride (NiMH) battery you can recharge using household
>> electricity or 12 V DC power from a vehicle DC outlet" makes it sound
>
> Readying further shows it's not as simple as they make it sound on the
> packaging. The battery charger runs off AC. If you need to charge it
> in a car/airplane, you plug the battery charger into the inverter and
> the inverter in to the car/airplane. [Since there's only one AC plug,
> unless you also carry a small power strip, you can't run the laptop
> off the car/plane at the same time as you charge the battery]
>
> That also means if you're 12V supply can't provide enough current to
> run the inverter, you can't charge the battery. Also, to do all that
> you have to carry around several cables that take up as much space as
> the battery and inverter themselves.
>
>> like if you can supply 12V at some reasonable current, you may be  
>> able
>> to charge it off solar cells. Whether you can wear a sufficient solar
>> cell is another question entirely.
>
> The concern is that a) there isn't 12V and b) even if there was, it's
> not enough to power the inverter and charge the battery. And c) the
> extra weight of carrying around all those cables. I would rather the
> battery charged off DC, and if you wanted to charge it using AC you
> use a standard wall wart to get the DC.
>
> --
> Craig
>
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> 
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