27000 Watt Load Complete Build!

hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Mr Carlson's lab today I'm going to put together a 27,000 watt load so I'll take you through the entire process and in the end we'll test it out and see how well it does see how much heat it creates let's get started here are the plans for the heater fans so I've got five of these orange versions and they only had five and I have uh an older uh White heater fan that looks like this or cream colored heater fan just kicking around so supposedly they're all 4,850 watts each all right so whether they are or not we're going to be safe and rate them at 4500 watts how does that sound so 4500 Watts time 6 fans is 27,000 watts and that's basically taken up by these heater coils right here the little induction motor in the back is basically drawing nothing compared to this thing basically what these things are whenever you look at a fan or any type of electric heater like this you can look at it as a big air cooled resistor that's what this thing is these big nichrome coils here just a big resistor and a fan that's cooling them off now I need to be able to control all of these fans individually or be able to turn them all on at once or all on in clusters and in order to do that I'm going to need a bunch of switches so I'm going to need to turn on the current to this large plug with this very teeny little switch how am I going to do that well I'm going to do that with a device called a solid state relay so basically solid state relays are a triac and an opto and a block whether they're gone fancy into zeroc cross uh I couldn't tell you in this case but uh that's really what these things are now this is supposedly rated at 60 amps now if we look at the backside here's something interesting you kind of see that little imprint there you see that as I rotate that a little screw right there are you picturing what I'm picturing looks like maybe a to220 package or something like that screwed to the back of this and if we're lucky Maybe to3 J or something like that anyways that would be the Tria side so that would be this side here that's the side that controls the load and then we'd have an opto and then on this side here we turn on the emitter side of the opto so it'll take between 3 or 32 volts that you can supply to this side basically very low current it turns on an optoisolator which tells the triac to turn on and then of course this controls are you know the current to the fan on this side supposedly there's a little indicator LED in there we'll find out if there is uh we really don't know if there is or even if this will hold up to 60 amps but this will only have to control roughly 20 amps so I figured you know at 60 amps we should at least have that safety margin right they do have quite a bit of weight to them but you know again who really knows right so because it'll take 3 to 32 volts on this side there's obviously some form of current limiting on this side to protect the opto and there's always drop across Triax right so uh whenever you have drop across a device it you know we have dissipation right it's going to get hot so it's not like a normal contactor like a relay contactor where you have contacts that go click and they close and there's very low resistance anytime you have drop across a device you can look at that like resistance and of course resistance is like what this heater is doing right it creates heat so that's the reason that they have the little device in here bolted to this piece of metal it's obviously supposed to be heat sunk to something so what we're going to do is screw this down to a wrap piece of aluminum or something like that I figure you know at 20 at 20 amps of of current control on this side it should be absolutely fine it might get mildly warm or something like that so so anyways I have six of these things which will control six of those things and uh of course there's all of these switches now the switches themselves I want to again want to be able to control these in a in a bank or alt together so what I'll do is I'll have a master switch here and this master switch will control all three of these switches and I'll have two separate sides so basically I if I turn the master on I can turn on each fan individually of course the these are turning on the the relays and the relays are turning on the fans right so I can turn these all on individually or if I want I can leave all three fans on and turn them all off and all on at the same time with one master switch so what that'll allow me to do is say have three fans loading the actual generator right and then then I can turn on another two here and then turn on another two at the same time so I can have it preloaded and then add load or I can shut them all off and then turn on all the load at the same time by turning you know the two switches on here and I I have all of these different combinations that I can experiment with to see how the generator will react under different load variation so I figure that would probably be the best thing to do I'll probably put it into this project box here just these little um switches here these will be mounted externally close to some plug down on the main board here and I'll have an umbilical cord run from this so I can turn everything on individually on this box I can fit a battery in here the battery will power up the emitter side of these optos I figure that should uh should do the trick well I've already switched the box out the other box was too small I figured I'd like some more space so I can flip the toggles a little easier the other way it would have been a little bit too cramped and to fit the battery in there with everything I also figure I'm going to add some LEDs to the box and I've had these things kicking around forever got these in an estate sale and I've never really done anything with them so I figure now is the perfect opportunity to use these little pre-made LEDs up so basically there'll be one LED above each switch to indicate if I've left a switch on of course the switches are kind of a silvery color and the box is a silvery color so I can see that easily happening so a nice little glowing LED will indicate when one of the switches is on right here in addition to the little LED that's supposedly in one of those solid state relays which we'll find that out here soon so what I'm going to do is center punch these I made a little Legend and I'll just center punch all of this and pre-drill these and fit the LEDs and all the switches into this Hammond box this a spring-loaded center punch right here these are very handy to have so basically what you do is you just as you can see here there's a bunch of little holes in the center of each one of these little dots so basically all you do is you align the center of the center punch to it and then you give it a push straight down like so and it goes click just like that and then you get a nice little Mark right in the center of the uh Center a little dot right there so then what I'll do is I'll take a very small drill bit and I'll pre-drill all of those little center punch marks the reason I use a small drill bit is so it won't wander out of the little punch Mark if you if The Cutting Edge of the bit is too large you know it really doesn't matter if you center punch then right so I pre-roll with a small bit that way it'll guide it through and then from the small bit I work my way up to the next bit that'll actually be the appropriate size all right they're all Center punched now just to drill out all the holes [Music] got little holes and now it's ready for the actual size [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] all [Music] [Music] [Music] the switch box is now complete I use some cat 5e cable that will run down to the optoisolator side of those solid state relays so the Box itself is completely isolated from this cable from the switch from the LEDs from the battery everything so basically this box is floating and I wanted that as one extra step of protection now the solid state relays themselves are isolated so the 240 volt side is isolated from the switch side but this is just one extra step of precaution so completely isolated on this side here on the back side this is what the wiring looks like it looks like quite a bit of work in there took about an hour to put this together maybe a little over an hour not too bad to wire all of that up and it's a pretty straightforward circuit so I'll just uh put this battery pack on here and take a look at how it works so say I want to turn on this side here what I can do is I can apply each load individually or I can shut them all off at once or turn them all on at once and I can do the same with this side here so say I wanted to run three loads and say after it's been running for a while I immediately want to add another two loads so what I would do is turn these two on and now they're ready to go when I push this switch up here so you can see this try to keep my hand out of the way so you can see what's going on so immediately add another two loads and then I can add in the sixth one if I like I can turn them all off individually and I can turn them all on individually and I can shut them all off with just two switches just like so and if I want to apply all six loads all at the same time I can just turn both switches on at the same time okay here's the plan for the generator side of things so the generator will come into these two posts and these two posts here will break off into the relays in the sockets so I picked up a whole bunch of these lugs right here as you can see they hold some pretty big wiring and there's two of them together on the top of this porcelain standoff now these standoffs come out of big old transmitters and they're used to having KV across them so they're absolutely fine so these will be tightened together with this nut here so it'll make these nice and tight they'll be a nice good current uh you know Passage through this no problems and then this will just be threaded somewhat tight into the into the actual ceramic insulator cuz I don't want to damage the insulator so these will stand up over here and then the solid state relays will bolt to this big chunk of aluminum that I found is a piece of scrap aluminum that I've got kicking around it' be awfully hard in any length of time for these things to heat that whole thing right up this will be also stood off the surface so I figure what I'm going to do since this is just a mockup of everything I'll probably put this on a piece of plywood for now screw everything down to a piece of plywood see how it all works and then in the end what I'll end up doing is transferring this into a very large project box so this will just be the trial for this to see how this all works I have a feeling it'll work just fine but uh it'll be a nice little trial and it'll allow us to see everything working and everything at the same time so don't try this at home this is definitely not a final device when this thing is done it'll be all shielded and everything like that so this here this is the plug for all of these units so I'll have six of these things probably stretched across here and these are the relays that will control it so basically there'll be the wires that lead off to the socket directly from the socket from this uh connection here to the socket and then from the socket back to the relay and then from the other side of the relay back to this post here and then these will all be turned on by that little box so this here is the 240 volt side and this here is the the low voltage side so the low voltage side is the side that gets switched by that little box completely isolated from the from the high voltage side another reason that I like to test this out on wood first is that it is a nice insulator I don't want to put this all down and bolt this all to any type of uh solid metal case at this point here I want to get everything all worked out and not only that there I didn't put any RFI or Emi protection inside that box because I wanted to keep that box completely isolated so I may need to add some down here I'm not sure which will just be bypass caps if I do that I'll tell you all about that when I do that it just depends on how the unit operates I think it'll be fine on its own there might even be a little bit of Emi RFI protection in these devices I don't know again down the road we're going to crack one of these things open and we'll look inside and see what they've actually done to uh try to control 60 amps worth with uh that small little package we were talking about there so I'll clean this thing up probably I just either wire brush this or whatever clean this all up cuz it's pretty dirty and I'll get all of this stuff all mounted and attached to the generator and we'll try it up oh another thing this is the wire I'm going to use is 10 gauge and these are the only two colors that they had so I am going to be using black and green instead of black and red so don't mind the colors the color usually green is earth right so that'll be the return line on here and then of course black is usually hot which it'll be here which is absolutely fine so don't mind coloring coloring is just coloring anyways but um yeah so that's that's all they had so this is what I'll be using here to color code things on this and uh make things a little bit easier to [Music] follow oh [Music] yeah [Music] so that's nice and smooth actually very very smooth so that'll work nice for the heat sink side of those solid state relays [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] f for [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm getting ready to wire this whole thing up now everything is all mounted and nice and sturdy on here I can lift this up by these two little porcelain insulators so um I also added a tap for neutral phase just in case I want to say add maybe two incandescent 120 volt light bulbs on each side there're a very good indication of when you apply a load and then of course click a load off you can watch the result of the bulbs as the uh as the generator is trying to stabilize so sometimes depending on the generator of course if the governor doesn't act fast enough or depending on the regulation of the particular generator you can you'll sometimes see them brighten up for a moment come down again or they'll dim out and then come back up again so it's a really good indication of how good the regulation is something as simple as an incandescent bulb and you want to know uh lately I've bought these LEDs uh LED bulbs which are absolutely horrible for sensing any type of voltage dip so of course they're designed to be dimmed so you you attach them to uh you know just a standard type of dimmer and you Dim them out and but any type of line variation you can see it in the actual bulb so even those new horrible bulbs may have a really good purpose here this would probably really I guess you could say amplify the effect if there's any sag or over voltage or anything like that so I'll probably end up adding those over here in the future I'm not going to do that now so what I'm doing right now is I'm just wiring everything up so putting wires in the back here and uh crimping on these connectors now there is something that's kind of interesting about these connectors and a lot of people really don't know this in order to crimp these things pardon the bump of the tripod there in order to crimp these things correctly I'll move this around you can see how this has this little dimple in the center and it is actually quite a large dimple it goes for quite a ways you can see this here see how far that goes across there so what happens is you can see they very heavy pair of pliers right very very heavy so with these particular types of connectors what they do is they have a split in the top of them and this dimple that you see right here I'm looking at this in a viewfinder so pardon the fumbling so this little dimple that you see right there should be placed directly on top of the split so when you pinch these together what it does is the wire is inside this so you you put the wire in here and what it does is when you when you pinch it it squeezes them down like this and it holds them really tight and if you look at this it's exactly what happens hopefully you can see that in the end there see how that pinches that down like so and that's how it should look and that's a nice clean I guess you could say crimp right there very very tight that would never come apart so that's what they're supposed to look like I know a lot of people they don't realize that and they buy these crimpers that don't even have that it's just basically two ovals you want to avoid those if you're ever using these type of connectors you definitely want the crimper with the dimple the test unit is done and ready to load down a generator so I've noticed so I'll turn this on here and I'll turn on the first one here which is this one right here they do have LEDs in them I've noticed that two of blocks have dimmer LEDs than the rest so this one here has got a a dimmer LED inside now the next one is normal I'll turn on the next bank here so this one here now next one and then the last one is another dim one so I don't know if they've changed the current limiting resistor in line with the LEDs or maybe just a different series of LED or something like that I measured the current on this side and they all draw about 10 to 11 milliamps on this one side so you know not too bad so I really don't know why they are a little bit di this back down here but it is ready to go all the wiring harnesses are all attached so this will attach to the generator here and all the fans will plug in here so let's go load that thing down and see what it does number four extension cord I cannot tell you how incredibly heavy just a piece of this cabling is taking the ends off this wiring basically stripping the wiring is like trying to peel a car tire so I think it took 15 minutes just to do that one piece and grab a piece of the uh grab a piece of this if you can see that very difficult stuff to uh move the focus up here very difficult stuff to it's like a garden hose anyways so that's ready to go it's wired into the generator so now all I need to do is connect those to the test platform here and plug in a bunch of heaters so grab the heaters here so here's a heater here and basically one cord there and the next air cooled resistor here 27,000 watts of resistive fun derated it's probably more than 27,000 Watts but uh we'll to say that to be safe my attempt to try and bring a summer day to this area all right so I have to put the three wires in here now I've never actually tested the actual L1 L2 and neutral inside this generator before because I've never actually pulled any current from it so I'm just using what it says in the block somebody's drawn on there and there's also current sensing Donuts inside the generator that this wire had to run through when I wired it so uh as you can see very freshly uh see where the uh hopefully the focus is in the center screen here so very freshly U peeled wires I guess you could say so anyways so I don't really have anything any neutral hookup on this thing I'm just putting this on here so I can test this with a voltmeter to make sure that this is neutral so this is the first time any current has ever been drawn from this gener generator so you'll witness that with me right here so I'll just tighten all of these in here and uh this is closer to this side and this one is closer to this side it really doesn't matter so the connections inside the generator these little blocks right here that I'm tightening into I can stick my entire finger into them so they're that big these are small tiny in comparison to what's inside that generator housing no kidding these things are like this probably like that just massive blocks and they have a Torx head on the top of them they don't have a flat kind of screw so obviously designed for uh a lot of current and I want to make sure that those are nice and tight this one really isn't that important so I'll test this with my voltmeter there should be 240 across this and then there should be 120 to these two and then 120 to these two here so there we go all wired up and ready to go so I'll get the generator started now when the generator is running I'm going to be using hand signals because it's so incredibly loud in here I have hearing protection on it so incredibly loud that uh it even swamps the mic that's strapped right to me right here it's you can't even hear me so I'll just use hand signals you know if something's good I'll give you a thumbs up and if something isn't I'll give it a thumbs down right so so I'll let you know like that and uh or maybe I'll walk outside the shop and shut the door cuz outside the shop it's a complete world of difference outside the shop you can hardly hear the generator inside the shop you can hear nothing but the generator so uh just you know night and day difference okay let's give this thing a preliminary test we should get about 20 amps of fan something like that and uh this is the voltage that will be across these two and to neutral so I'll try and stay out of the way here so I can show you all of this kind of hard to keep this all in frame so we'll turn these all on one by one to make sure every one of these solid state relays is working cuz remember we had some dim ones so uh I don't know what that's about so uh let's try try this together I got to tell you I'm a bit nervous about these blocks that's about it cuz if one of the blocks isn't working or those two that were dim aren't working it kind of throws this test off I'll have to order some new ones so anyways let's uh hope for the best so I have the generator warmed up already and everything is connected but nothing has been tried because we're going to experience this together and if it's a failure it's a failure all right so here we go I'm probably talking really loud cuz I have hearing protection on okay so it's preheating now so it's going to start so this will be the end of my talking cuz you won't hear me I won't hear me here's a view of everything running I'll start each individual fan so here we go again I'll just make hand signals cuz it's going to get Mighty loud and it's [Applause] preheating w it's like a summer day in here did you know I've released another invention on patreon so for those of you that have been around here for a while you probably know about the Carlson super probe well even if you've been on the internet for a while it's all over the internet people have been building their own versions of the super probe well now I've released the ultra Probe on patreon with all the files even the artwork for the Box all explicit uh build instructions and everything to put this thing together to give you an example of how sensitive the ultra probe is is it will listen to music in your body from a distance away I've also shown this on patreon as well and I'll show that here on this channel coming up very shortly so if you want the ultimate troubleshooting tool very sensitive to listen to noise and components you can even listen to noise noise in bearings so if you have mechanical noise coming from somewhere it'll even help you narrow that down that's how incredibly sensitive this device is very very neat tool for the bench and you can build one yourself there's lots and lots of plans everything is up there there's a whole series of videos on how to put this thing together so if you're not there you're missing out definitely check out patreon it's all up there I have an ongoing Electronics course there where I share my designs and inventions and I share my electronics knowledge there as well so you're definitely going to want to check that out I'll put the link just below the video's description under the show more Tab and I'll pin the link at the top of the comment section so if you click on the link it'll take you right there if you enjoy the videos you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe so that way you'll be notified as soon as I post a brand new video until next time take care hope you enjoyed bye for now

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 72,758

Keywords: watts, wattage, high wattage, generator test, test equipment, electrical engineering, electronic engineering, electronic design, electronic repairs, circuit design, repair a circuit, repair electronics, test electronics, fix electronics, valve radios, tube radios, tube amplifiers, transistor circuits, learn electronics, electronic teacher, best electronic teacher, best electronics teacher

Id: J16R9c5NdVA

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024