Is charging battery tools through an inverter - bad?
Someone said using an inverter to charge up battery tools destroys the batteries in them: is this true?
Is it possible to charge batttery tools from a caar battery, solar panel etc?
[g]
no. Nothing bad about it in terms of he effect on the battieries. However stoppeing voltage up then back down is energy inefficient & cost inefficient.
course. Providing the source voltage is higher than the charging battery voltage, plus a small margin fo the charging circuitry. The simpole way is to just use a resistor to lmiit charge current. The better way is to feed an intelligent charger with the low votage power, that way it delivers the right amount of charge every time, charges fast, and shuts off once full.
NT
I tried using a 300w inverter to charge Makita batteries with a Makita charger & the red light warning of overheating came on all the time - so I stopped doing it.
Daft I know using a 12v car system boosted up to 230v, then stepped back down to 12v, but it would be handy sometimes.
Not likely, always assuming the charger is happy on an invertor supply. My phone charger is but I have a "universal" AAA/AA charger that does two batteries per side and only one side works when on the invertor supply, it's fine on mains.
With the relvant charge controller yes but don't expect raopid results froma small solar panel... Also you'd be limited to power tools with batteries of less than 10v or so allowing for ineffciencies in the chareg controller. Of course you may be able to find a charge controller that lives on 12v but can up the output voltage.
Probably a lot easier to get an invertor and use the normal mains charger if it's happy.
If you can justify 40 quid, this is the best way:
(I know buying one of those would be silly for just one device.)
I charged a Li-ion camera battery a few times using an inverter on holiday and it never seemed to hold its charge as well afterwards.
I don't know whether the inverter produces a dodgy 240V AC profile and that mucks up the stepped down output from the charger, but I wouldn't try it again.
I'm happy to be told I'm worrying unnecessarily, but I'd want a very strong reassurance.
A true Sine wave inverter will provide power indistinguishable from mains and the charger will work as normal.
Inexpensive Inverters produce rough approximations of a sine wave and many electronic devices do not operate properly if the approximation is too rough. Remove SPAMX from email address
Think only one person said it could be a problem.... i can only imagine those who said it wasnt have never tired it,
the kinds of inverters you get to from catalouges, supermarkets, makro, b&q etc are modified square wave inverters, that is they make up the sine wave of the AC output with a few steps, cheaper the inverter the less steps there are, which results in a rough power output,
for most items thats not a problem, lights couldent care less, motors will buzz but still work, owt with a transformer in it will buzz, run a little hotter but usually be fine,
But anything that uses a switched mode psu in it, which most drill chargers do nowadays, will not like the non pure sine wave, and anything which uses tyristors for speed controll will let the magic smoke out pretty quick.
Some smpsu's will not even power up, others will but make bad whining noises, some will apparantly be working fine but will overheat in a short time, depending on the protection circuits this could be a one time only event, i.e. the gharger/psu is dead afterwards, or it could work again once it's cooled down.
I used to have a 1600 watt modified sine wave inverter in my motorhome, powered the items i needed at the time (the centeral vacuum which was a simple universal motor, GF's hair drier... universal motor and heater element, microwave, which ran a little noisier than on mains) everything else i ran from 12 volts directly (which is provided by a 460 AH battery bank, 350 watt solar array, dedicated alternator on the engine and a 12 volt generator)
However when i fitted a washing machine, the modified sine wave inverter had to be changed for a pure sine wave model, about £350 quid with the part ex from my existing inverter, but we are talking a 1500 watt inverter here that can power the whole motorhome.
you'd prolly only want a 100 watt inverter to run a charger, but even that will be over 100 quid,
and as others have mentioned, it's a bit daft to go from 12 volts DC, upto
240 AC, then back down to 12 volts DC to charge the battery, i used to charge ni-cad drill packs using a radio controll models charger, there are tons of them available, 90% run on 12 volts DC, you just need to be able to connect the battery to the charger, an old mains charger can be canibalized for the contact plate, or croc slips used if the batt pack has pins.I've now got li-ion batteried drills, i do have a li-ion/li-po 12 volt input charger for my RC planes flight packs, but i havent had the need to use it to charge the drill packs yet,
Assuming the tool is less than 12v, it might be possible to modify the charger to also accept an input direct from the car battery - ie after the mains SMPS in the charger.
Or try another inverter. Some produce a better waveform than others.
The Medway Handyman used his keyboard to write :
Were you perhaps charging the batteries in the passenger footwell, with the heater going full blast?
A typical modern tool battery charger is a switch mode type power supply. The convert the mains input to DC, then chop that back to high frequency AC to feed through the internal high frequency transformer before converting back to DC. So basically running it off a 12 to 240v inverter should not make any difference at all.
Since the charger smpsu will have a rectifier & reservoir cap input, what possible difference does it make? Assuming of course that the output voltage has correct peak value.
That's understandable, the WM controller operates on different principles and assumptions to a battery charger.
NT
Snag is some inverters produce what could be described as a very dirty sine wave and some SMPS won't work correctly from it.
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