Quote:
Originally Posted by InterBlog
Look at the anecdotal reports just for the most prominent flagship users - if anyone should be able to achieve reliable operation, it's flagships like James Adinaro, who is himself an aerospace engineer. But so far, IIRC he has blown at least one alternator, and he just blew his rig's head gasket as well, and it's not that old. SOMETHING is going on there.
As for us, we are not done addressing the issue yet. Husband and I are going to install countermeasures to guard against future in-kind alternator failure while still engaging in limited, targeted single-alternator charging.
My husband is a mechanical engineer with a lot of electrical experience, and he is *insisting* on designing a circuit for this control purpose. He's in design phase right now, with a mountain of components strewn about his desk.
I keep telling him, "Look, just give me a second isolation switch that I can reach from the driver's seat, plus an in-dash live chassis battery voltmeter. MY BRAIN can take care of the logic if I have just those two things at my fingertips!"
But he won't have anything to do with that idea. It's inelegant, in his engineer's viewpoint. He wants the logic to be codified, rather than brain-ified. Ugh.
On one hand, we have posters who are close to 100% emotional (which drives me bat-**** crazy), and OTOH, we have posters like my husband who are 100% engineering/mechanical. Me, I fall on the continuum, but closer to the engineer endpoint.
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I would tend to agree with this, and add one more thing. If you aren't getting some failures sometimes in your projects and experiments, you aren't really pushing hard enough to get maximum benefit, either. If existing stuff works fine, that is one thing, but with all the emerging tech happening and getting applied to different things, you do wind up on your own fairly often. The question is if you see something that just doesn't work all that great, or you can see potential things that might be issues, what do you do? Lots of different ways to answer that one.
I am an engineer, but think more like Interblog on a lot of this. The cockpit mounted disconnect mentioned and the reasoning was actually done on on our van several system changes ago, and is still there in a updated form. Electronic logic can do lots of stuff, and is very consistent, but unless it is AI, it does nothing for the intangibles that are quick and easy for a person. Are you coming up on mountain with the alternator charging at the max it can without overheating? If so, it would certainly make sense to turn it off to save the hp for the climbing and save the alternator all the heat that is going to be in engine compartment from the climb at full engine output. The list of stuff like this goes on and on and as long as I have to be sitting there driving, it is literally not any work to do. It might even relieve driving boredom a little. I can see alternator(s) temps, coach amps and volts, coach battery amps, coach battery temp, all from the seat so the decisions are extremely easy to make, and the relay controlled manual separator is a simple push of a button, as is charge stage changes. I just have it locked in absorption (AGM batteries) until I get to an amp reading to the batteries that is within what the solar can put out under the conditions and then unlock the absorption and let it go to float while the solar takes over. Often I will also just turn off the separator as charging is from the engine isn't needed by then.
Of course, some like everything done automatically and are OK with whatever things may not get covered quite as well and the extra complexity, but I prefer simple and flexible. To each their own.
Hybrid Mode
