DIY 12V Generator Charger - 10 Demonstration and How to Build

hello everyone Norrell are here today I'm going to show my 12-volt DC generator actually operating earlier I had made a multi-part series on designing and constructing this 12 volt generator and I covered a lot of the technical details and why things were done things that work things that didn't and a lot of people just wanted to see it running now I didn't show that because it isn't all that informational but perhaps it's entertaining so today I'm going to show this setup actually running with my 1000 M power battery bank and my inverter and this is what I can use during the power outage to actually power my entire house - the AC in the heat I have that compete that I can use so let's take a closer look at and here is the 12-volt generator now it may look a little bit hokey but this actually is engineered and optimized for this particular setup and I won't go over all of the details here but I'm at least going to give a summary because I'm sure not all of you want to watch the I think it was a 10 part series that I made on actually constructing this so if you want to build one like this I'll go over the components that you actually need first of all I put this on a wooden platform that's not the optimal setup but that's what I had on hand and I don't like buying things if I don't need to so I put it on this particular board and it worked okay but the board was a little bit too flexible so I took an old satellite dish a pole and just bolted it to this particular wooden board that keeps it from flexing and makes it rigid enough to actually work for the exhaust I just grabbed some flux pipe to a muffler and then out underneath my garage door and I'll show how I do that a little bit later I tested that for carbon monoxide etc and it is safe for me to use one thing that I did not note on my video about how to quiet a generator is that this is very important you need to mush up the end of the pipe this 2 inch exhaust pipe is way too large it's entirely unnecessary Cerie for an engine of 183 CCS which is what that one is and this makes it significantly quieter really the only sound left is the mechanical noise from the engine it's much quieter that way so that's something I should have mentioned in the previous video but I did not do that yet so it was not in that video in any case this particular engine here is 6 horsepower ignore this it's irrelevant what matters is the displacement for setup like this you want a cut 180 cc's of displacement if you have an overhead valve engine around 200 if you have a flat head another important thing that you want to look for is a variable throttle control if it is a fixed feed throttle I would recommend not using it that is not the optimal setup for the alternator this is a 27 SI alternator and you can look up from auto parts stores what uses a 27 si this probably came off with a I don't know an 82 Camaro or something like that I'm not sure but I purchased this one from an auto store it only cost me around 70 bucks as a lifetime warranty should last a couple thousand hours and I did test this out I can run it at full load continuously and it doesn't really break a sweat at all now that is not true of other alternators on the market so you can't use just any alternator I would recommend a 27 si that worked quite well the cs1 30s and such don't work very well for this for pulley setups I got this one from Jegs this is an aluminum racing pulley a lot of people say that it's an under drive pulley that is incorrect this actually is a racing bully an untried pulley generally goes on the crankshaft of your engine not on the alternator because if you put this on an ordinary car this is way too large and it won't generate much of anything at all had idle in a racing application your engine is always screaming along at 5,000 rpms or hoar and this size pulley is adequate it keeps the alternator in a more efficient range and allows more horsepower to the wheels which is what you want and yes this is a racing pulley but it's a good size in this application I think it's about 5 inches in diameter and over here on the engine I also have a 5-inch pulley so basically you want a one-to-one ratio from your engine to your alternator and using a small pulley on the alternator like what they normally come with from the factory doesn't work very well I'll go over why but I would recommend this setup also this is Kevlar belt if you use a standard neoprene belt they are more elastic than the Kevlar type and they're also a couple bucks cheaper but you really don't need that elasticity for this setup so I just reckon by getting a Kevlar belt and over here I have in our meter you can see that I've run this thing for about seven hours and also wrote down the last time I changed the oil just for my sake but anyway this is the general setup and in my videos I went over how to hook up the alternator you can also look that up on the internet I have a fused for 120 amps just in case I have here this momentary switch to enable it I'll go over that a little bit later and then I have it wired up to my battery bank in my basement currently I'm in my garage and it runs through these six gauge cables to this quick disconnect and then up through some zero gauge cabling let a high up running into my basement so let's quit go to my basement see what that is here we are in my basement I have a split foyer so runs in right here runs down over here through another quick disconnect and then into my battery bank so this way I can safely disconnect it on either side without any risk of shorting something I also have it running through this fuse good practice I guess not really necessary and then my battery bank I have a video series on this particular battery bank as well I think there's 12 I believe don't remember exactly but twelve of these industrial batteries in this battery bank I was lucky enough to get these in good condition as Salvage equipment which was pretty awesome so I have my battery charger from the garage going into this end and the inverter hooked up to the other end this inverter is a samalex pure sine-wave 3000 watt inverter did purchase this one - very nice inverter have gone through a lot of inverters that blood or inverter reviews out there and I kept this one which says something about it it's awesome I love it over here I have my voltmeter you can see that this battery bank is currently thirteen point one volts and this meter is just connected up to these leads so it includes the voltage drop of these cables going down to the batteries but we'll ignore that for now so this is my inverter outside I have my generator ii around my generator to power up the batteries if i had solar panels that could also use those and use the generator as a backup they don't currently have a space for solar panels unfortunately but these batteries here will ask me about one day for powering my whole house now for connecting this to my house i also made a video series on that i'll put these links in the description below but to connect this to the house well how do you connect that to a house well you use a cable like this it is not the safest thing in the world to mail ends and there are a lot of caveats to this in order to do it safely and i would encourage you to watch my video series on that if you're interested in it but i actually do it a little bit differently than i do in that series because i built something else I built this particular cable here all it is is a twenty dual 20 amp outlet and the two are split apart so each outlet is on a separate phase and then it plugs into my dryer outlet and this allows me to power both phases of my house very conveniently from one location I can also just plug this into the wall and get to 20 amp outlets if I want that in any case most of you probably want to see this thing actually running so let's go out to the garage and start it up I'm going to start this up and show you it operating here shortly but first I want to temper expectations just a little bit this engine says six horsepower now if you bought a generator set a six horsepower engine would power about a three thousand watt generator but I'd be three thousand watts surge it would be twenty five hundred twenty six hundred watts continuous however this has an automotive alternator that is a 100 amp automotive alternator and this setup is optimized for about 80 amps output that means it only outputs about a kilo pow and that may seem pathetic but it really is a pretty good design and I'm going to quit go over that you can skip this if you're not interested but this particular engine can do six horsepower at 3,600 rpm this is not a generator governor governor engine this has a utility governor on it that means that at six thirty six hundred rpms it does not hold a steady 3,600 rpm under load it sags if it I go down to 3,200 rpm something like that and at 3200 rpm zyk no longer do sig horsepower now I don't want this screaming away at 3,600 rpm so it's really inefficient really loud really annoying and I just don't want that so I optimized this setup so that both the engine and the alternator are operating at their optimum efficiency point this engine is most efficient as our all engines of this type is most efficient at about 2500 rpms and about 70 percent output torque alternators are most efficient at about 2500 rpms alternator speed and around a full full load full field and this particular alternator is a hundred amp alternator if you spin it way up screaming fast but it gets to be about 50 percent efficient if you do that it's closer to 70 percent efficient if you run it this way you only get 80 amps that's the trade-off but that way both the engine and the alternator operated their optimum efficiency point so if you consider all the losses in this system your engine at 2500 rpms only outputs a certain amount of power you can only really use about 80 percent of that power if you want to do a real continuous loads you have to subtract that the belt setup takes maybe 10% of that power away again your alternators 65 percent efficient something like that and after all of these losses are considered this setup fully loads the engine at 2500 rpms and powers this alternator at a top at its optimum efficiency point this particular engine was purchased new old stock from Japan back when briggs-stratton major vanguard and in Japan I don't want their Chinese junk so I got this one the height of GX engines would be the probably the best in the market for this particular setup and this particular setup here should operate for around two thousand hours quite reliably before anything needs to be serviced other than oil changes and the like but let's show you how to get this thing started up now first of all I don't store this with the belt type I could but I just don't do that so I'll show you how I tighten them so basically I just take a big old pry bar stick it in here and tighten it up and this particular bolt here that holds it in place happens to be back in and now the belt is nice and tight next I open the garage door just a little bit and kick the exhaust pipe underneath there we go how the exhaust goes outside the next I can start it up before I do because it'll be loud and I can't talk I'll describe what I'm going to do here first of all this alternator is connected up to the batteries right now so if I take a look at the battery voltage you can see here that the battery voltage is about thirteen point one volts and when I start this thing up the voltage equal up I also have this ammeter clamped around the cable so you can see how many amps it's providing now this here is the start up switch it's just a momentary switch and that's important because when I hit the switch the amperage pops up to something relatively high forward to eight amps depending on how the brushes happen to be sitting inside this alternator and that drains your battery you could hook it up to a lamp or something but I think a momentary switch is easiest that way I can just fill this tank up let it run till it runs out of fuel couple of hours and then it doesn't draw any current anymore which is perfect for my application so let's start this thing up here we are in my basement again and I forgot to mention that that generator setup is designed so that I can operate in both the coldest and the hottest weather that's important that alternator outputs about 80 amps during the summer it does a hundred or a little bit more amps during the winter because it's colder and the engine can't produce as much power when it's cold as when it's warm so there's a trade-off there to make sure the engine doesn't bog down but you can kind of hear the engine run in the background in my house but it's not very loud and over here you can see that the voltage is now 14 and a half volts so it is charging these batteries but they're pretty well fully charged so let's turn you vert on there's the inverter running and let's load the inverter down a little bit so that we can actually test out this generator and see what it can do I plugged in about 500 watts of halogen lights and now the inverter is or the generator is now powering these halogen lights you can see that the battery voltage is still 13 point 6 volts even after running through all these cables at the alternator it's still over 14 volts I'm sure it does have to run through 40 feet of cabling or so so there's some voltage drop in that I lose about a volt at 100 amps through all that cable in any case it should have no trouble powering 500 watt load so let's load it down with another 1500 watt electric heater and these are obviously just dummy loads so now we have a much lower voltage the alternator should be outputting a good amount of power and the engine is about as loaded as it's going to get so let's go check on it and see how it's doing and there we go my inverter generator here is working just fine it outputs around 80 amps continuously it doesn't get too hot doing it recharges my battery bank if I choose to do that I can just fill it up with gasoline start it up it runs for a few hours till it runs out of fuel and it quits and at that point well I'm just running on batteries again and I have used this setup to run my entire house I tried it out for a full day just to see how it worked and it worked pretty well we've also used it through one power outage already so I wanted to show you my 12-volt DC generator actually operating and this is it operating with my battery bank and my inverter thanks for watching you

Channel: knurlgnar24

Views: 646,064

Rating: 4.6371241 out of 5

Keywords: Electric Generator (Invention), Do It Yourself (Hobby), Belt Drive, Alternator, Electric generator, Inverter, Energy, Solar, Gas, Solar Energy (Industry), Power, Natural Gas (Industry)

Id: bjv1SEx5iNA

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 17 2014