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Battery charging station?

Submitted by Matt Barnson on Wed, 2007-11-21 17:31.

So I popped down to the club field today and was excited to find a generator locked away there! It's an older model (so any potential thieves, it ain't worth much), but it looks to have plenty of 110v plugs and is probably good for 1000 watts, looks like.

My thought was that we should build a battery charging station between the clubhouse and the restroom. We could permanently mount a couple of high-amperage 12V switching power supplies (I can get them for free!) to be able to provide 40+ amps of 12V current to banana jacks along a table, with a small roof over the top to prevent the rain from rusting out the banana jacks. We could pour a little concrete pad for the generator to rest on while it's running so that it has a stable platform and doesn't get too mucked up if there's been a recent rain.

Anybody interested in helping to build one over the winter? I'm drawing up some plans right now...

--Matt

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Good idea

Submitted by JonB on Sun, 2007-11-25 21:40.

Good idea. Remember you need to design something "easily relocatable."

Are you thinking of a small shed to house the generator and a power distribution bench on it?

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More along the lines...

Submitted by Matt Barnson on Sat, 2007-12-01 08:55.

I was thinking more along the lines of something where you drag the generator out of the shed to use it, then put the generator back when you are done. So maybe four 4x6 posts sunk into concrete, a small concrete pad, and then make it so that the bench-charging area on top of those posts is easily relocatable. I hadn't thought of an easy way to make a permanent home for the generator... after talking to Mike Passey, he mentioned that he thought the generator actually belonged to Evan who left it there after working on the shed.

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Generator available

Submitted by MikeMancuso on Sun, 2007-12-02 20:15.

I have a old 1800 W Gen, that I could donate to the club if the other one was not intended to be left at the flying field.
It does have electic start. It does run, but may need some work.

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Perfect!

Submitted by Matt Barnson on Mon, 2007-12-10 18:50.

My thought is that this would be very cool. I'm pricing out some solar options (put a panel or two on top of the clubhouse to keep things topped-off) but when we really stress out the deep-cycle batteries, we could hook up the generator. I think we could build the whole project for a fairly reasonable price...

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