James Paulson's roll off roof observatory at the Sunridge Observatory site, taken in the summer of 1986, housing a 10 inch f/5 Cave Astrola Newtonian reflector telescope



Saturday, June 25, 2011

Upgraded Powertank


I went ahead and added a 400 watt inverter to my power box in order to accomodate my laptops. I am going to run a pair of laptops, one older one with an RS-232 serial port for guiding and a newer one that has considerably better battery life for running my camera with BackyardEOS.

I added a 105 amp hour marine deep cycle to the case at the same time. Walmart now sells only the hybrid deep cycle but this unit delivers almost 25 additional amp hours over their old deep cycle battery and I have a 3 stage battery charger to keep it properly conditioned. I think this should be enough to power all of my needs for an evening.

And if not, I have other options. I can use the battery pack for the telescope in an emergency, or get a second battery box and gang it alongside this unit in parallel and double my capacity.

2 comments:

  1. I would like to build something like this. Can you share the specs please?

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  2. A group 24 deep cycle battery mounted in a marine case. The 12 volt plugs were picked up at auto parts stores and wired with fused to ring terminals to connect to the battery, as was the inverter. To charge the battery, remove the lid and use a car battery charger. This unit provides more than enough power for my laptop, dew heaters and telescopes and cameras for a night of imaging.

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