Blessings, Snow Crow
For example, when I originally discussed it with him, I was using a 7AH SLA battery. Using 8 of his resistors dumps about 11A at 14.5v if I remember right. That is nearly 3 times the C20 rate for that SLA, meaning it would run the battery down very quickly when it dumped.
The point in that rambling in the paragraph above is that there is a relationship between the batteries and the dump load itself. GHurd's circuitry just CONTROLS it. The individual FETs on the controller handle 6A very easily, and you can output to MANY FETs.
The short answer: I use his controller on a 12V, 220AH battery bank. Works great. Glen is the man.
Kinda fun, but prolly not a good idea. Bad for the bulb and that is a lot of strain on the inner workings of the motor (genny) I imagine. [ Parent ]
Voltage too low is okay for the cheesy 12v radio or whatever, but I didn't know how to keep, say, 20 volts going in to it when the wind kicked up. GHurds controller could start "dumping" around 12v and enough loads would stall out that genny enough to keep it down. But man, didn't you have to be careful to balance your loads? Cuz I know in my case that the light stalled it to the point that it would dim out, then come back, then dim.... like a really lame strobe light.
The battery size is not important, past being somewhat suited to the rest of the system.
It is being used on everything from rechargable AAs to about 1,000AH. Big systems really should consider something fancier. 100AH is still fairly small.
After reading the abuse you guys put them through, I'm glad I spent a lot of time making them rugged! G-
