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Solar battery chargers for equipment
Can anyone recommend a good solar automotive type battery charger/maintainer that will work outdoors? One of those would probably be just the ticket for our chipper battery that sits months between uses.
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
Most of them are made for in-the-car use, where you stick it on the dash or visor and plug it into the 12V jack/lighter. Hard to find a dash, visor or 12V lighter on a chipper  It's easy to take a solar cell and have it charge all the time, it's harder to make one that provides proper maintenance logic to prevent overcharge and plate desulphating logic. I want a solar powered battery minder.
Regarding fuel, I have never had a problem using Stabil for storage and Power-Service as an additive. I always add about 50% more Stabil than the bottle says and have used gasoline and diesel for up to 18 mos. afterwards without trouble, even when stored in plastic containers. No idea at what point it goes bad since it never has. I always filter the diesel through a water-filtering funnel when filling tanks and add the PS afterwards (the PS dissipates water which would allow it to pass through the funnel).
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
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Yes, you'd toss the cig-lighter plug and hard-wire it to the terminals. The little panels sold for domestic use put so little amperage into the battery (during sunlight) that there's little danger of overcharging. "Smart charger" circuitry would be better, but I haven't seen it on these units.Thanks for the suggestion on fuel stabilization.
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Thanks, maybe nobody makes a smart solar charger. Most of the small panels state that they aren't for outdoor use. I'm looking for something that can be rained on and frozen.
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
I found a bunch of 1.8W chargers (1800 mA) but not any 180mA versions. Maybe I need to shop some more but given that it will generally be parked in the woods I wonder how much power they would really put out.
Murf, in the winter I pretty much park the chipper in the woods and chain it to a couple of big trees. It's a long way to the nearest outlet.
Edit: Whoops, don't know what I was thinking. 1.8W is ~150mA at a fixed 12V so maybe we're looking at the same type of units.
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
Funny thing about Batteries Plus. Most folks think they're a retail outlet but it seems they are more involved in batteries than you might realize.
Our company makes a low volume product that uses a custom lithium-ion battery pack with an on-board intelligent "gas gauge" chip that mates to a charge controller chip in the unit. The pack was badly designed by a battery manufacturer and the product is such low volume that they weren't interested in fixing the problems so they "fired" us as a customer. Which left us unable to ship this product for lack of batteries.
We had a lot of trouble finding a new supplier. For the heck of it one of the guys in manufacturing called the local Batteries Plus retail store. They ended up having some folks in Taiwan redesign the custom battery pack for us and after a bit of tweaking it is a much better pack than the original ever was. Who would have thought?
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
Due to non-disclosure I can't give specifics but the company is a major player in the laser industry producing products used for medical, manufacturing, research, etc. The product mentioned is a laser energy/power measurement instrument and I write embedded firmware for these devices.
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
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So did you guys build the laser they used in the Austin Powers movie "Goldmember"? The one that nearly got Michael Caine?  Sorry, couldn't resist........  Best of luck. |
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Never saw that movie. We have divisions all over the world and make a lot of products but maybe we should bump up the R&D budget for weapons that seek out and destroy the bad guys. I'd like to write some of that code and have a few bad guys in mind
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Solar battery chargers for equipment
I just don't "get" Austin Powers. Saw the first one and couldn't wait for it to be over. Maybe I needed to have a beer or six first.
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Gas Generator Weather Protecti
09-19-2009, 16:38 
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