HI all,
so when I was in engineering marketing 20+ years ago, I used to give a presentation which showed an 8-track car unit, which then had an audio cassette adaptor inserted, which then had a portable CD player plugged into that via a 3.5mm jack plug, finally followed by an iPOD doing the same thing. Moral of the story was - well, retrofitting to existing technology ain't always better, best to (in most cases) chuck away the old tech and just invest in the new tech up front.
On that note, I find myself at the last hurdle as to whether to ditch the Clayton LPS v1 or to keep it for a while. So i've managed to track down (hopefully) all the bizzarre current drains and unit auto shutoffs (with the help of a FW update), with the help of @Phill I've manged to prove a solar retrofit to it directly into the back of the unit through a Y-splitter on the 50A Anderson connectors. Now all I need is a battery capacity bigger than the 100Ah (which effectively is a 64-80Ah LIFeO4 because of auto shutdown protections on the unit).
So the question is - has anyone seriously looked at adding additional battery capacity (as a skunkworks project !) to these units? Even if it isto use an external battery or device to keep the Clayton battery topped up? For example, with the solar input through an MPPT, could a secondary battery be charged by a LOAD tapoff, and then somehow be fed back into Clayton using the same methodology (back-charging) as the solar? Any other possible options to explore?
Unfortunately I'm not as au-fait with battery technology & 12v/car systems as I should be, but willing to have a crack at any possible ideas !
Thx
Dave
so when I was in engineering marketing 20+ years ago, I used to give a presentation which showed an 8-track car unit, which then had an audio cassette adaptor inserted, which then had a portable CD player plugged into that via a 3.5mm jack plug, finally followed by an iPOD doing the same thing. Moral of the story was - well, retrofitting to existing technology ain't always better, best to (in most cases) chuck away the old tech and just invest in the new tech up front.
On that note, I find myself at the last hurdle as to whether to ditch the Clayton LPS v1 or to keep it for a while. So i've managed to track down (hopefully) all the bizzarre current drains and unit auto shutoffs (with the help of a FW update), with the help of @Phill I've manged to prove a solar retrofit to it directly into the back of the unit through a Y-splitter on the 50A Anderson connectors. Now all I need is a battery capacity bigger than the 100Ah (which effectively is a 64-80Ah LIFeO4 because of auto shutdown protections on the unit).
So the question is - has anyone seriously looked at adding additional battery capacity (as a skunkworks project !) to these units? Even if it isto use an external battery or device to keep the Clayton battery topped up? For example, with the solar input through an MPPT, could a secondary battery be charged by a LOAD tapoff, and then somehow be fed back into Clayton using the same methodology (back-charging) as the solar? Any other possible options to explore?
Unfortunately I'm not as au-fait with battery technology & 12v/car systems as I should be, but willing to have a crack at any possible ideas !
Thx
Dave
