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+--- Thread: Tonight's the night! (/Thread-Tonight-s-the-night)
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Tonight's the night! - OMyMyOHellYes - 10-22-2015
Alrighty then. Wicked bad storms supposed to be coming through. Dog is doped up with Zanex. I am about ready to go to bed. With the storms out there, I decided to go ahead and press the homemade DC CPAP UPS into service. This is not your Best Buy or Newegg UPS. I assembled it from a small radio power supply I cranked up to 14.5 V, a Super PowerGate from West Mountain Radio and a 12 V 35 AH battery. I have some fine tuning yet to do on cables (YAY! More stripping and Power Pole crimping! So much fun!), but it is functional in current state.
Not that I expect a big outage, but with storms, particularly big thunderstorms as we see in North Texas, often the power blinks for a minute or two. Usually just long enough for me to wake up real good (I roll over waking about 3 seconds after the CPAP goes dead - at that 60 second mark I am usually WIDE awake). Sometimes it lasts for 5-10 minutes before power comes back. Sometimes once it goes out and comes back up, but it will go out again one or two more times. I am thinking this usually has something to do with a transformer somewhere in the area getting popped or maybe even a structure at a local substation, followed by a kind of reset. But what do I know? My electrical engineering education consisted of spending the night at a Holiday Inn Express while traveling on business a few years back.
I intend for this to be a full time setup once I do some housekeeping an the aforementioned fine tuning to the cable configuration. Will hit ya back up afterwards.
OMMOHY
RE: Tonight's the night! - justMongo - 10-22-2015
I heard you were having wicked weather in Texas.
So the power supply was, I am guessing, formerly a 13.9 VDC supply for Ham radio.
And you modified the resistor divider in the either the sense or reference side of the regulator to get 14.5 V.
I assume that was to compensate for the forward diode drop in the Super PowerGate.
(I do believe the Super PowerGate uses Schottky diodes to minimize forward drop.)
Have a good evening there...
Mongo
RE: Tonight's the night! - cate1898 - 10-23-2015
Hope everything works well for you! It is smart to be proactive and have a backup plan at the ready. Lucky you to be so technologically minded!!
RE: Tonight's the night! - OMyMyOHellYes - 10-23-2015
(10-22-2015, 10:17 PM)justMongo Wrote: So the power supply was, I am guessing, formerly a 13.9 VDC supply for Ham radio.
And you modified the resistor divider in the either the sense or reference side of the regulator to get 14.5 V.
I assume that was to compensate for the forward diode drop in the Super PowerGate.
(I do believe the Super PowerGate uses Schottky diodes to minimize forward drop.)
Mongo
Voltage adjustment was easier than that. It's an Astron 12 A switching supply (SS-12). It has an adjustment pot on the side of the box. Changed primarily to feed battery during charging. However, most all the time, it will be in float mode and may not need that much.
Works slicker than owl snot when I click the switch the power supply off/on/off/on.
OMMOHY
RE: Tonight's the night! - justMongo - 10-23-2015
I have two Astron supplies. One is a switcher, SS-25M. And the other is a linear, RS-35M.
Sounds like last night was a success...
RE: Tonight's the night! - parkerdt - 10-23-2015
I am not sure what the coefficient of slickness is for owl snot?
But congrats on deriving a working backup solution!
RE: Tonight's the night! - PaytonA - 10-23-2015
The slickness coefficient for owl snot is slicker than snot on a doorknob. That makes it pretty slick.
RE: Tonight's the night! - Ghost1958 - 10-23-2015
Generator. Lol
I thought about a battery backup and running our two pr machines off constantly trickle charging batts. But gassing batteries in the bedtoom doesnt sound appealing
RE: Tonight's the night! - justMongo - 10-23-2015
These are not flooded lead acid batteries. They are sealed gel electrolyte. They don't leak or out-gas.
Many Ham operators have very similar setups for their radios.
RE: Tonight's the night! - AlanE - 10-24-2015
You guys quack me up.