I know that Lee has posted regularly about his zener+bulb balancer and today I was finally making the connection while freeing our
Christmas tree from its light strings. I picked this (fake) tree up for free a couple years ago and although I was appalled by the power consumption of the thing, I had not bothered to upgrade until now. I have no clue why they strung *12* strings of *50* lights each in a 6-ft tree. No wonder it consumed somewhere around 260 Watts. I saw a noticeable increase in power bill for Nov/Dec, but now I am going through the tedious work of unstringing all 12 (6 in the upper and 6 in the lower part of the tree) of 120V single strings. Next year I will string a couple LED strings in there and enjoy a much lighter bill. While unstringing, I was wondering what to do with the removed lights. These are 2.5V lights that draw about 22W per string, approx 180mA according to my Kill a Watt meter. Then it hit me - these are probably perfect to use in balancers. Add 2 zeners (6.2 plus 6.8V) and you have a good protection for 12V lead-acid batteries. Use a single zener and two bulbs parallel for protection of a pack with 6V (golfcart size gel batteries for example). Flooded batteries do not need regulators, but sealed batteries do. Anybody interested in one or more strings of 50 bulbs? Regards, Cor van de Water Chief Scientist Proxim Wireless Corporation http://www.proxim.com <http://www.proxim.com> Email: [email protected] Private: http://www.cvandewater.info <http://www.cvandewater.infom> Skype: cor_van_de_water Tel: +1 408 383 7626 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140106/86165dce/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
