PD or Iota for my upgrade?
I'm thinking about a converter and battery upgrade. The batteries will be wet cell lead acid 6 volt Possible T-105s or the 230AH, EGC2 from Sam's club. I'll probably go for four. (Does nayone have...
Forum Discussion
Wayne Dohnal wrote:
I ran a PD9160 charging test with the real battery:
Thank you for the real data.
I was at the river again this weekend, so didn't do much, but I did run some brief tests when I got home. I wanted to know if the Onan 4.0 CCK Spec R generator in my RV (vintage 1972) would fully power my PD9280 in view of the reported low power factor (PF). This was one issue that concerned me about buying the PD and I hoped my particular gen would not suffer from any issue.
I also wanted to know if the PD9280 could put out near its 80A limit when the battery was near fully charged. IOW, whether I could only get 80A output when the state of charge was low.
At home, I was at 94% SOC as measured on the TriMetric on a 460AH battery bank connected to the PD9280 with 1/0 cables a bit shorter than 3' each.
With the PD running on 115VAC shore power, I saw 78 amps DC charging the batteries. On the 126 ACV gen I saw 82 DC amps. I went back and forth a few times and measured current with another meter (same results each time - slightly higher output on generator higher voltage than on shore power lower voltage).
This isn't conclusive, but it's what I hoped to see. Eventually, I'll do more formal tests, but this was just a quick look to see what happens with the new installation.
With the battery near fully charged (roughly 94%), the battery voltage was above 14 volts during charging, yet I was still able to supply full rated current (80A from the PD) from both AC sources.
In this brief testing period, I could detect no effect due to a low PF of the PD converter when powering the new PD converter with AC from my old generator. That generator has a heavy rotor and no voltage regulator. The speed of the rotor directly sets the output voltage. "Heavy" means that rotational speed doesn't change quickly, so inertia keeps it turning even if all the current is being pulled at the top of each AC pulse. The throttle opens to the average power required to keep the load supplied and the rotor turning.
The absence of a VR means there's no interaction between a VR and the low PF load that might cause the output voltage to change quickly.
